The Smoke of Satan in Your House
by Matrix Refugee
Summary: When a bishop possibly in league with the demons threatens to close a historic parish, the Church's least faithful son may be the only one who can prevent something far worse... COMPLETE
1. Prologue: The Scent of Evil

+J.M.J.+

The Smoke of Satan in Your House

by "Matrix Refugee"

Summary: When a bishop possibly in league with the demons threatens to close a historic parish, the Church's least faithful son may be the only one who can prevent something far worse...

Rating: T (spiritually mature themes)

Warnings: None for this chapter

Author's Note: The central scenario of this story, a historic church in danger of being closed, is inspired by something actually happening to my own parish. I've changed names and locations, but many of the facts are unchanged. Please don't think I'm trying to take advantage of a small tragedy for the sake of angst or drama, like those idiots that write badfics about the Columbine High School massacre, 9/11, the Tsunami of 2004 or more recently:shudder: the Terri Schindler-Schiavo tragedy; I'm using fanfiction as a creative outlet to vent some of my frustrations about a situation that is somewhat out of my control. ...And since I'm convinced that the bishop behind the imminent closing of my parish is demonically posessed, I'm curious as to what would happen if he crossed paths with the movie-verse version of John Constantine...

Disclaimer: I don't own "Constantine", its characters, concepts and other indicia, which are the property of Francis Lawrence, Village Roadshow, Warner Brothers, DC Comics/Vertigo, et al. And I certainly don't own any of the demons (I wouldn't want to, either!).

"The smoke of Satan has entered the Church" Pope Leo XIII

Prologue: The Scent of Evil

Once the delegation of concerned parishoners from Sankt Maria der Magdalena (German) Catholic Church had finished presenting their case, the look on Bishop Benjamin Mallegant's round face told them more about his internal decision than any amount of words.

He sat back in the chair behind his desk, looking out at the people clustered in his office with paternal concern, yet with adamant finality. "I'm very well aware of how you all feel about the church which houses your parish community, but we have to be practical and live in reality," he said. "And that reality is that it would be less of a drain on the finances of the diocese if we close the building and move your parish to a neighboring church. A building that old isn't cheap to maintain."

"But what about the Tridentine Mass community? There aren't any churches in the area that could really accomodate the ritual requirements: none of the altars are oriented the right way," Georg Schuller, the parish historian and accountant said, simply stating the facts, but with a note of desperation.

Bishop Mallegant sighed. "Oh, we'll sort that all out eventually; I'll speak with your pastor about that in private, at another time and place."

Natalie O'Halloran, seated at the back of the group, praying the rosary in silent support, detected an oddly harrassed note in the bishop's tone. Shielding herself behind the people in front of her, she looked up at the bishop. The slight smile on his face might have been intended to look disarming, but a look in his pale eyes suggested he wanted nothing more to do with their plea.

"That's part of the problem: our present paster, Father Herbert Manning has been asking to retire on account of his health," said Alissa Hoyt, one of the parish council members, a sturdy blonde woman in her late thirties. "We've got another priest coming in to take his place, Father Henry Prewitt, but he's currently tied up with his transferral paperwork.

Bishop Mallegant spread his hands and rolled his eyes in exasperated surrender. "It's out of my hands. I'm up to my eyebrows in trying to settle the financial mess my predecessor left. I know this will sound crude and even blasphemous to you, but the money from the sale of some of the land Sankt Maria's and a few other struggling churches like it would help balance the deficit."

Natalie had to bite her tongue to keep from blurting out, 'How valuable would Sankt Maria's be? It's in the middle of the bloody housing projects and the old mill section of Houlton!' But looking into the bishop's eyes made her gulp these words: she thought she saw something flicker in them that didn't belong there.

Bishop Mallegant rose, an unspoken declaration that he had nothing more to say to them and that he would hear nothing more from them. "I truly wish I could discuss this matter with you further, but I'm afraid I'm late for an important engagement."

The dozen parish representatives rose as one; Natalie could feel the dissappointment flowing from them all, echoed in her own choked-up feeling, but that vanisheed, pushed aside by the strange aura that surrounded Bishop Mallegant, like a smell.

"Will you give us your blessing?" Schuller asked, with a hint of defeat.

Bishop Mallegant let out a quiet sigh. "As you wish, my children." The gathering knelt before the bishop as he raised his hand over them and prayed the invocation out loud; but as he did so that aura thickened into a smell, like rotten eggs burning in an open sewer...

2.

"I think your imagination was simply over-reacting," Father Prewitt said to Natalie, after morning Mass the next day, as she walked by his side in the snow-buried rose garden at Sankt Maria's. He'd been listening to her account of the previous day's meeting with the bishop, which he'd been unable to attend.

Natalie paused, in the shadow of the church building, close by one of the buttresses supporting the walls of the imposing yet graceful Gothic structure. "I don't think I was," she said. "It felt too real. It got worse when he was blessing us, as if the blessing gave it an allergic reaction."

He chuckled gently. "Interesting metaphor... Please don't think I'm saying it's impossible, but I don't think it would happen to Bishop Mallegant. That look in his eye was probably just from his own exhaustion. I've heard that he's been up late with a debt consultant and several accountants, trying to settle the dioceasan books after the financial scandal broke last year."

That story had been all over the newspaper and Internet headlines and the newscasts on the radio and the television: several priests appointed to collect money for the annual Diocesan Appeal had been caught pocketing the funds, an abuse that had been going on for years, which meant the total losses were now in the millions. What made it more damaging was that the offenders had used the money for their own needs: one had paid off a lover who had threatened to go public about their affair; a few others had used the cash to feed their substance addictions; two other priests had been paying off gambling debts. The previous bishop, Cardinal James Bacon, had resigned from his post after admitting he'd cast a blind eye to these abuses. The Vatican had appointed Bishop Mallegant soon afterwards, but within a matter of months, he had announced that in order to balance the books, the diocease would have to "reconfigure" itself and close some churches which housed smaller or older parishes, selling the buildings or the land they occupied.

The two of them paused before the larger-than-life white marble statue of St. Mary Magdalen, at the center of the garden. The face of the penitent woman seemed to peer shyly from under her veil, yet the artist had given her a gently sensuous mouth and a shapely form.

"It's ironic, though, that one of the parishes slated for closing should be this one, when you consider who its patron saint is," Father Prewitt said, looking up at the statue.

"Because of the snarky comment Judas Iscariot made about Mary Magdalen pouring the perfumed oil on Christ's head, when she could have sold it and brought in some money for the poor?" Natalie said, her eye on the jar in the hands of the statue before them.

"Exactly."

"But... didn't Christ also cast seven demons out of her?"

"Which brings us back to your story," Father Prewitt said. He fell silent, his gaze lingering in a thoughtful way on the Magdalen's statue. "You'd really need to speak to Father Martin Crowley, the dioceasan exorcist about this; I'll see if I can put in a word with him. But I'd better warn you: it might take a while for him to get back to you, since the case load has been heavy this year.

"Why does that not surprise me?" Natalie said.

"You've probably just been reading one too many horror novels lately," the priest said, indulgently but with a gently teasing lilt.

She shook her head. "I've been too busy, between working at my job and working on saving our church."

"You keep busy with that: I'll let you know if Father Crowley can fit in an appointment with you," the priest said.

"Thank you, Father," she said, reaching out and clasping his hand in relief and gratitude.

3.

Within a few days, Father Prewitt called Natalie to tell her he'd spoken with Father Martin Crowley, the current exorcist, but he added a warning that the exorcist might not be able to free up much time to meet with her, since he had a backlog of cases he was trying to get under control. Natalie called Father Crowley later that day; she managed to get through long enough to make an appointment to meet with him, a week from that day, at a coffee shop not far from Sankt Maria's.

On the afternoon they were supposed to meet, Natalie waited over an hour for the exorcist to arrive, but at length he entered and approached the table: he was a tall, lean man in his late fifties, his platinum-blonde hair turned to silver and white in several patches. A vaguely haunted look showed in his long, lantern-jawed face, and his dark eyes had a look about him that suggested many years of gazing into faces and at horrors no human should have to look upon.

"Father Crowley?" she said, rising. "I'm Natalie O'Halloran."

"Yes, that's me," he said. "Peace be with you, Natalie."

"And with your spirit, " she replied.

Once she had sat down again, he seated himself in the chair across from hers, clearly welcoming the respite. A waitress approached to take his order: black coffer, no cream or sugar.

After the waitress had bustled away, the exorcist got down to business. "Father Prewit tells me that you sensed something strange about Bishop Mallegant."

"Yes, though I suppose I might just have been over-reacting to him, thinking he's in league with the devils when he's only making some contraversial decisions."

He shook his head. "No, you weren't over-reacting at all. There really is something dangerous going on with him."

"How did you find that out?"

"I had the oppurtunity to put your theory to the test a few days ago: there was a lunch meeting of the diocesan council: I offered to refill His Eminence's coffee cup, and when he couldn't see what I was doing, I blessed the contents of a packet of sweetener and put it in." A trace of slightly smirking smile showed on Father Crowley's face, but that quickly faded. "As soon as he drank it, he got nauseous and had to excuse himself for a few moments. Even before that, I sensed the presence of the old 'grappin', the old sinner, about him the whole time."

"You can sense the presence of evil spirits?" she asked.

"Not as strongly as some people can. But, if someone has served as an exorcist for as long as I have, they get to know the signs, like an dermatologist can spot certain skin conditions in the people around him."

"So will you do it? Will you exorcise him?" She leaned closer, almost conspiratorially.

He shook his head sadly. "No... I would if I could, but I'm afraid my hands are tied, thanks to a lovely conflict of interests," he said with a hint of sarcasm. "If I tried, it would probably cost me this position, and at my stage in life, I can't run that risk. Mallegant isn't an easy bishop to serve under, and he's only gotten worse over time... though that might of course have something to do with the houseguests in his being."

She leaned back in her chair, defeated. "So what are you going to do?"

Father Crowley leaned closer to her, lowering his voice as he spoke. "I know someone who could help us; he's sort of a supernatural detective, based out on the West Coast, Los Angeles to be precise. His name's John Constantine: I've known him for several years. He's a strange sort, definately rough around the edges of his soul, but he's good at what he does."

"Is he a priest?"

"No, but he's got the gift for dislodging the most stubborn demons. I'll call him tonight and run this past him, see if he'll come out here and put his hand to this."

"You said 'if'... why does that give me a bad feeling?"

"I wouldn't call him unpredictable, but he's the sort who doesn't let himself get involved in anyone's problems needlessly. Like I said, he's a tough character, just to prepare you in case he agrees to come out here."

"I'd better start praying, then, that he does," Natalie said.

Father Crowley smiled. "You do that: I'll take care of the mundane matters of calling him and getting him here in the first place."

To Be Continued...

Literary Easter Eggs:

Father Martin Crowley I based his appearance and some elements of his personality on the late novelist, biblical scholar and dioceasan exorcist Father Malachi Martin.

"the old 'grappin'" This was a slang term which St. Jean-Marie Vianney, an 19th century French priest, used to refer to the demons which used to pester him constantly at night. 


	2. 1: Contractors and Commissions

+J.M.J.+

The Smoke of Satan in Your House

by "Matrix Refugee"

Rating: T (spiritually mature themes, mild swearing)

Warnings: Nothing too bad in this chapter, aside from the stray expletives.

Author's Note: This was a tough chapter to write, especially in lieu of recent events. Thus, I'm dedicating this chapter to the late, great Pope John Paul II (born Karol Wojtyla), a great leader of the Catholic Church, who has gone on to a greater commission in the next world.

Disclaimer: I don't own "Constantine", its characters, concepts and other indicia, which are the property of Francis Lawrence, Village Roadshow, Warner Brothers, DC Comics/Vertigo, et al. And I certainly don't own any of the demons (I wouldn't want to, either!).

"The line between Good and Evil runs not between nations, or parties, or physical armies, but down the middle of every human soul" Peter Kreeft, paraphrasing Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Chapter One: Contractors and Commissions

The 3:03 pm flight from LAX to Manchester had to circle the runway three times before it could land, thanks to the mix of snow, sleet and rain falling that day. That caused too much of a delay for the tall, dark-haired man in economy class, who sat silently cursing whatever airline policy had put the clamps on smoking in that section.

Once the plane finally landed, an announcement came that they'd have to wait again, since a runway crew had to clear ice off their landing dock. The dark man cursed under his breath, eliciting a scolding glare from the primly dressed older woman sitting in the seat next to his.

At length, the plane taxied to the loading ramp and the passengers were allowed to disembark. The tall man hefted his carry-on down from the overhead comparment and slung its strap onto his shoulder before following the rest of the crowd to the airport check-out and to collect his suitcase.

Naturally, it didn't turn up on the baggage carousel. The dark man found one of the baggage clerks and demanded that they double-check for it.

The clerk consulted a bill of lading on her terminal screen. "I'm sorry, Mr. Considine, but your bag seems to have been misdirected. We'll try to locate it and have it sent to you as soon as possible."

"Constantine," the tall, dark man said.

"Excuse me?"

"My name. It's John Constantine."

"Oh, I see now," the clerk said. She rummaged for a form and pushed it across the counter to him, "If you'll just fill out Form #13-66F, Mr. Considine..."

A few moments, later, as he passed through the airport metal detectors, something in Constantine's jacket pocket set it off. The guard made him step aside and turn out his pockets before patting him down. As Constantine removed his antique cigarette lighter and his keyring, the guard eyed the Latin inscriptions crudely etched on the casing of the lighter and the large St. Anthony and St. Benedict medals on the keyring with barely veiled suspicion. Constantine ignored the glare, but a small part of him started to wonder if there just might be some modicum of truth to the blatherings of the Christian fundamentalist wack-jobs who claimed the plane hijackers of 9-11-2001 were doing the work of the devils. Between that and the heightened security, it dragged just a bit more of hell onto the human plane.

He finally made it to the entryway of the terminal. As he stepped through the automatic sliding doors, a gust of cold air hurled a wave of snowflakes and horizontal rain into his face. Constantine turned the collar of his jacket up around his neck. He muttered a short string of obscenities under his breath, directed at the snow and his own stupidity: he'd packed his trenchcoat in the now-missing suitcase when he should have packed it into his carry-on.

At that point, an ancient, rust-brown Chevy Cavalier clattered up to the curb in front of him: the body of the car had gone so badly to rust he couldn't tell where the paint color left off and the rust spots started. The passenger side door opened and Father Crowley leaned his head out. "Sorry I'm a bit late, John: I was trying to find a parking space."

"Hell, it fits in with the rest of the day," Constantine replied, stuffing his carry-on into the back seat before climbing into the front. As he pulled the door shut behind him, he discovered it had a warp in it that caused it to shut crooked; at Crowley's prompting, he had to open it and slam it twice to get it to close right.

"Nice car," Constantine said, fumbling in his shirt pocket for the packet of Lucky Strikes there.

"It's a gift from a friend," Crowley said. "At least it runs good."

"A friend who likes gag gifts as much as your boss does?" Constantine said, taking out a cigarette, replacing the pack in his pocket and cracking the window open an inch or two before he lit up.

Crowley replied with a wry smile of amusement, as they pulled out of the lot and onto the access road leading to the highway.

After a long moment, Constantine broke the stillness. "So what have you got for me this time that you couldn't go into detail over the phone?"

"It's a long story, John," Crowley said, gazing past the wipers slapping across the windshield, knocking away the slush that splotched the glass. "Bishop Mallegant's got himself into a mess, and it's not just over that deal with the embezzlement: I counted at least three demons in him and there's probably more."

"So what do you need me for? Why not pull them out yourself?" Constantine said, blowing a plume of smoke out the window.

"I can't: My hands are tied. Mallegant would throw me out on my ear if I so much as hinted he might have a devil, and we know what kind of fireworks I'd have to deal with if I approached him with a Ritualis in my hand."

Constantine snorted. "Would that be the demons doing it or Mallegant?"

"Between you and me, John, there's times I can't tell the difference. The man's such a tight-fisted prick..." The older man dropped his gaze a fraction of an inch, a slightly embarassed smile showing on his lips.

Constantine ignored this peccadillo. "Go on."

"Okay... I wasn't the one who found this out: a woman from one of the parishes Mallegant wants closed to 'reconfigure' the diocease was at a meeting with Mallegant, and she claims she smelled something odd about him. She spoke with Father Henry from St. Antony's Parish, who put me in touch with her."

"Which parish is she with? There's, what, ten parishes they're closing?"

"Fifteen, and they already shut down three in the last month. She's with Sankt Maria Magdalena's, the old German parish in the east end of Houlton."

Somehow that seemed fitting: a woman would sense demons in a bishop who was trying to shut down a parish named for a woman Jesus had pulled seven demons out of. He flicked the burned-down stub of his cigarette out into the snow and closed the window. There had to be something to this: these things didn't just happen, without someone nudging together the pieces of a much bigger puzzle around, to twig the feelers of those who had an idea of how the universe really worked.

He'd think more about this later: right now, he needed something warm inside him and a roof over his head that had more insulation than the bare metal of the car roof.

They pulled off the highway onto a secondary road into Houlton, then pulled off it onto another street. They slowed in front of a three-story building of granite blocks, which looked like it might have been part of a private school at one point, but which now housed members of the diocesan chancery, the priests who served in the administrative positions. It didn't surprise Constantine when he saw a large sign on wooden posts reading "FOR SALE", outside the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the lawn before the residency.

Crowley must have divined his thoughts. "I've been looking for another place to live; depending on how long you're out here, don't be surprised if we get evicted at a minute's notice," he said, pulling the car into the parking lot in back of the building.

"I'll keep my bags packed, in that case," Constantine said. "...If the airline coughs up my other bag."

"Mm, you'll be needing a coat in this weather," Crowley said. "You can borrow some of my civvies, then: we're about the same size."

They entered by a side door, clearly trying to be discreet, but they nearly walked into a husky, charmless woman in her mid-fifties, who glared up at Constantine.

"All right, Father Martin: who's this young man?" she asked.

"This is my sister's son, John," Crowley said, without batting an eyelash. "He's in from the West Coast for a few days, running research for a case he's working."

The housekeeper... jail matron... whatever she was, glared at Constantine. "What kind of case are we talkin' about? You better not be a lawyer."

"It's part of a private investigation," Constantine replied, calmly.

"So why didn't you find yourself a hotel to stay in?" the housekeeper demanded, making a move like she'd haul him out into the rain herself.

"John's new to the area, and it's been a while since he and I saw much of each other," Crowley said.

The housekeeper muttered something under her breath. "All right, young man: as long as you don't keep strange hours or bring anyone in who doesn't belong here, you can stay." With that, she turned and started to walk away.

Before she got too far out of his range, Constantine let his awareness reach out and explore the old woman's aura. Nope, nothing dangerous or suspicious about her, just a crabby old woman with a shrivelled soul, but she could still be a problem: she'd weakened her defenses and the demons might thus be able to use her to get at him, or use her to interfere with his work.

"Don't mind Ursula: she's a bit of a bear, but she's mostly like that because she might be losing her job,"Crowley said, and lead the way up a twisting staircase to the second floor. He approached a door at the far end of the hallway and unlocked first a deadbolt, then the lock on the latch before pushing the door open.

The room inside had a lived-in look: papers scattered in some odd filing arrangement on the desk, books piled on chairs and the floor, old-fashioned colored etchings of saints and the Blessed Virgin in cheap frames on the walls, verses in Latin written in chalk on the mouldings of the doorframe and the windowframes, even on some of the furniture.

"You want anything, John?" Crowley asked, closing the door behind them. "Coffee? Tea? I've got some Irish whiskey my aunt Bridget sent, if I could find it in this mess... Or I could scare up a meal from the refectory."

"Coffee'll do: I ate on the plane," Constantine lied.

Crowley scanned the younger man's face knowingly, as he cleared some books off the couch, but he said, "Is the jet lag getting to you?"

"Could be," Constantine said, dumping his bag on the floor in the corner and collapsing on the couch. He looked up at Crowley and asked, "Your sister's son?"

Crowley shrugged. "Not a lie: we're all children of the same first parents, or members of the same race, however you look at it." He headed for the small kitchen area rigged up on a tall bench in one corner with a tiny refridgerator, a wooden cupboard on the wall, a hot plate he probably wasn't supposed to have, and a coffeemaker. Lowering his voice as he puttered about the coffeemaker, he added, "Ursula partly does and partly doesn't have a right to know who you are, but since I know she's the sort who'd throw you out because she thought you were a crank, but there's some here who'd throw you out for being the real thing."

"Any other house rules I need to know about?" Constantine asked.

"Not especially."

"What about this woman who tipped you off? She'd better not be one of these jittery schoolgirl types, seein' spooks everywhere."

"As I told you, John, this is the real thing: I saw it with my own eyes. Do you want me to put her in touch with you?"

"I'll meet with her, but I haven't taken the job yet. It sounds like a tough one."

"Those are usually the most rewarding," Crowley said. "I'll call her and ask her up here, let you decide after you've spoken with her."

"You're the one with the collar and the commission: it's your case, I'm just a contractor," Constantine said, closing his eyes.

2.

The phone rang on Natalie's desk in the main office of Catholic Charities rang. She minimized the window of the form she had been entering and turned to answer it. "Hello?"

"Hello, Natalie? It's Father Crowley," the exorcist's voice said, on the other end of the line. "I'm just calling to ask you if it might be possible for us to meet again, regarding your case." He sounded more business-like than he had when he spoke to her face to face, but she set aside all concern over it: he might just be less than comfortable with phones.

"Oh, certainly: and the sooner the better. I'm free tonight, if that's all right with you," she said.

"Are you sure? It's still a mess out there."

"I'll manage."

"All right then, I'll meet with you in the sitting room here at the residency, around eight."

"I'll be there," Natalie said, hope rising in her soul, as she made a notation on her planner.

3.

At a quarter past eight, a cab dropped Natalie off at the gates of the residency. She hurried up the gravelled walk to the three stone steps to the front door. Once under the portico sheltering the doorway, she lowered her umbrella and reached up to pull on the chain for the doorbell.

Somewhere inside the building, a bell clanked. Several moments later, she heard a bolt rattle, and one leaf of the door opened. A young seminarian looked out.

"Can I help you, miss?" he asked.

"Yes, I'm hear to speak with Father Martin Crowley," she said.

"He's expecting you," the seminarian said, stepping aside and letting her enter. She took off the black scarf that covered her head. The seminarian closed the door behind her, then took her damp scarf and coat to a cloak room off the foyer before he led her down a short corridor to a combination sitting room and library, a large, high-ceiling room lined with bookcases. Here and there were small clusters of armchairs and couches, some seperated from the rest of the room with privacy screens. The air smelled slightly of old leather, floor wax and woodsmoke from the fire in a fireplace at the head of the room, toward which the seminarian led her.

Before the fire stood two high-backed wooden benches, one occupied by Father Crowley; in the other, a youngish man sat hunched close to the fire. As she approached, Father Crowley looked up. "Natalie, thank God. I hope it wasn't too much of a hazard for you, coming out here in the rain," he said, rising.

"It's all right: it had to be done," Natalie said. "I'm used to this weather: I'm New England-bred and born."

"Probably the only way you can take the damn cold," the young man said, without rising.

She got a second look at Father Crowley's companion: the newcomer was reasonably good-looking, though he could have used a shave, and the loose-cut black suit he wore looked like he'd slept in it.

"Which leads me to introduce the young fellow I asked to come out here to help you," Father Crowley said, turning toward his companion.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Constantine," Natalie said, extending her hand towards him.

Constantine glanced at her hand, then flicked the filter tip of a cigarette he'd been discreetly smoking into the fireplace. "John or Constantine will do: I'm not much for formalities," he said.

"I see," she said. "That's quite all right." Natalie sat down on the bench facing him, letting her hand relax in her lap.

"In that case, I'll leave you two in privacy to talk this over," Father Crowley said, and stepped away. Constantine watched the priest without turning his head; Natalie followed his gaze to a couch at some distance away, where Father Crowley seated himself, close enough that he wouldn't overhear, but clearly keeping an eye out to warn off any would-be interlopers.

"So... how long have you known Father Crowley?" Natalie asked.

"It's probably upwards of fifteen years now," Constantine asked. "Why, is that important?"

"I'm just curious," she said. She got the feeling Constantine was older than he looked, and probably much older through experience than most people.

"Curious..." he said, with a trace of mild scorn, "You shouldn't get curious around someone like me: it's not healthy. You wind up finding out things you'd rather not know, if you manage to come away with your mind still glued together, or with your life's blood inside you where it belongs."

That gave her reason to pause; she caught herself feeling inwardly glad Father Crowley had warned her about his friend's "abrasive" personality.

"Okay, I'll put it another way: as they say in the old movies, 'just give me the facts, ma'am'."

"How much did he tell you? I don't want to repeat anything," she said.

"He'd told me he picked a vibe from Bishop Mallegant, that he might have some houseguests of the hellish sort, and he said that he'd been tipped off by a woman in the diocease, but he couldn't tell me more, other than he can't pull the demons out himself, or else he'll get canned for it."

"Did he tell you about how I found this out?"

"He mentioned something about you being at some meeting with Mallegant. He didn't give me the specifics, said you'd have to tell me that."

"I was there with a group of people from my parish, Sankt Maria Magdalena's; Bishop Mallegant wants to close the church and have the land sold to the developers. The thing is, it can't be worth much: it's right in the middle of a rough neighborhood... well, not that rough. You wouldn't need a machine gun to walk down the street at night without getting bothered, but you'd at least need a few rocks in your pockets."

Constantine shrugged and fumbled in his breast pocket, taking out a pack of cigarettes. "Wish I could help you there, but keeping churches from getting shut up permanently is no more in my range than it is in yours."

"True... but you see, this church... it's more than just a building or a sacred space for me: it's kind of my home."

Constantine shrugged and shook a cigarette out of the pack. "So, I take it they'll find another church for your parish to occupy."

"It's not that easy for me: I've got a bit of an autism spectrum condition, so it isn't easy for me to move to a new place, especially when I've been forced there."

"Look, don't give me any of that psychobabble crap. What do you want from me?" He didn't raise his voice, but he was clearly losing a little of his patience.

Natalie forced herself not to turn inward, the way she did when someone got impatient with her. She looked around, making sure no one other than Father Crowley was listening, then she leaned closer to Constantine. "Back to that meeting with Bishop Mallegant. I saw something about him that didn't belong.

Constantine tamped the filter tip of the cigarette on the lens of his wristwatch. "Something like what?"

"It was his eyes: they didn't look right. It was like something was looking out through them that didn't belong there. And there was this odd smell around him."

"He could have forgotten his roll-on."

"I take public transportation: I know what unwashed bodies smell like... this was worse, like rotten eggs in the sun, and an open sewer on a hot day."

He looked at her directly. "Has this ever happened to you before?"

"No... well, not as strongly as this. It used to happen to me more when I was in my teens. I'd sense things around people: A man in our building who sold his daughter. A woman who was dealing drugs."

He looked her up and down. "You don't strike me as the sort who'd hang with people like that."

"My dad's a social worker at Catholic Charities. I've been working there as a filing clerk: I'm usually in the back office, but I've seen a few things that shouldn't have to happen to anyone."

"In more ways than one," Constantine said.

"But is that even possible? For a priest or a bishop to become possessed?"

"It's just as possible for a priest to be possessed as it is for anyone else: they're humans like the rest of us, and the demons can use them to try getting through just as much as the next guy. It all depends on if he makes himself vulnerable to it."

She nodded. "I've read a little bit about this... You're what they call a sensitive, you've got the gift of discerning spirits."

Constantine cut her off with a mildy cynical laughing jag that quickly turned into a coughing fit. Recovering after a few minutes, and visibly catching his breath, he said, "'Sensitive' is the last word anyone who knows me would dare to use to describe me. If you've got the 'gift'," he made quotation marks around the word, with two fingers of both hands "You haven't got it as bad as some, and you especially don't have it as bad as I do, because you wouldn't be calling it a gift."

"Maybe I just carry it more lightly than you do."

"If you had any amount of this talent, you'd be as messed-up in the head as I am."

"Please... are you going to help us out at all?" she asked, nearly snapping from desperation. Just as soon as the words were out, she wished she'd phrased them differently: a thoroughly annoyed light had come into Constantine's eyes, but he made no move to dismiss her or to get up and leave.

"Hey, I only just got here and I'm trying to figure out what the hell is going on before I get too involved," he said.

She drew in a long breath, settling her mind as best as she could. "I'm sorry I snapped at you: I'm just horribly upset by everything that's happening. I just feel like we're in this on our own, fighting this by ourselves, and no one will help us. I didn't mean to take it out on you."

"Don't sweat it: I've had a lot worse done to me and a lot worse things said to my face," he said. "You just let me find my way around this: last thing I need is getting someone needlessly over-involved. If this is the real thing, it's gonna be hardcore and I don't need someone too close to it getting underfoot."

"In other words, 'Do not attempt this yourself: you are a professional'."

He cracked a small smile. "You got it," he said, relaxing his face.

She rose. "I guess I'd better not take any more of your time," she said. "Thanks... for listening."

He took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and shook one out, thrusting it between his lips. "Part of the job: listening to people's stories, getting the facts so I know what I'm up against."

"Kinda like a detective?"

He shrugged, lighting up the cigarette. "One way of looking at it."

4.

"How well do you know that girl?" Constantine asked, later, as he sat in Crowley's room, on the couch that would be his bed for as long as he stayed here.

The water in the small closet of a bathroom shut off. "Not very well, I'm afraid: Father Prewitt could tell you more about her. Why d'you ask?"

"Nothing, it's just, if you didn't have an eye on this case, I'd say she was buggy and leave it at that."

"She didn't make a very good first impression."

"Hell, no." He wasn't about to turn his back on this yet. He was getting too many vibes. "So this church is in the middle of the rough part of town?"

The older man emerged from the bathroom, clad in a fraying terry bathrobe over well-mended flannel pyjamas. "Yeah, a lot of the tough kids I knew growing up came from that parish."

"I suppose I oughta pay the place a visit, see what I'm getting myself into," Constantine said.

Crowley sat down on his narrow cot of a bed, reaching for the box of sleeping pills on the nightstand-bookcase near the head of the bed. "Well, tomorrow's Sunday: I'm offering Mass in the home of a woman recently delivered from the old grappin. I could drop you off at Sankt Maria's on my way there."

"That'll work," Constantine said, laying down on the couch and pulling the blankets over himself.

"I'd better warn you: I'd be dropping you off around eleven in the morning, right in time for the Tridentine Latin Mass. The folks that attend it can be a sticky lot: they aren't as nasty as the crowd that's messed up with the Society of St. Pius X cell that's been floating around the diocese, but they can be a little edgy around newcomers."

"And I take it that includes newcomers who don't quite meet their idea of a nice Catholic man," Constantine said. "That might be a good thing: they might leave me alone to do my work."

A thought occurred to him, which made him chuckle tersely, careful not to set off a coughing fit.

"Something funny?" Crowley asked, over the rim of a glass of water.

"Yeah... straight-laced folks in a parish named after a whore who'd had seven demons clawing at her insides."

"Talk about cosmic irony," Crowley said with a grin, setting the glass on the nightstand and thrusting his legs under his lone blanket before reaching up to switch out the light over the bed.

"Damn right," Constantine replied.

To Be Continued...

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

Literary Easter Eggs:

Considine - A little bit of a joke on myself: I kept running across the name "Considine" somewhere, recently, so naturally my somewhat obsessive brain kept trying to scramble it into "Constantine".

Father Crowley's car - My ex-fiance owned a car a lot like it: in fact, it had belonged to a priest-friend of his, who'd given it to my ex when a member of his friend's first parish gave him a newer car.

"a sensitive" - For more about this, read Gabriel Amorth's "An Exorcist Tells His Story" and "An Exorcist: More Stories"

the Society of St. Pius X - The quickest way to define this is a fundamentalist Catholic group which stirred up a lot of contraversy in the Catholic Church back in the 1980s, one of their hallmarks being their yelling that the Tridentine Latin Mass is the only valid Mass. Unfortunately, they attracted so much attention that now a lot of people in and out of the Church have unfortunately gotten the notion that all Catholics who are fond of the Latin Mass (even ones who, like myself, are fine with the vernacular Mass) are also fundamentalist wack-jobs. There's a few people who are of that bend at my parish, but the majority of the group that attends the Latin Mass there are, like myself, moderate/orthodox people. 


	3. 2: Under the Floorboards

+J.M.J.+

The Smoke of Satan in Your House

by "Matrix Refugee"

Rating: T (spiritually mature themes, language)

Warnings: None for this chapter, aside from Constantine's occasional expletives.

Author's Note: Just in time for the election of Pope Benedict XVI, I finally got the next chapter typed (Deo Gratias! Thank you, God!). Special thanks goes out to all my kind reviewers. Glad to see there's so many of you who are enjoying this story! "grumpygrim" asked me if this story takes place before or after the movie: I've been thinking it takes place before the movie, and the next chapter will definately confirm it (you'll see why when I post it, once I finish it...).

Disclaimer: I don't own "Constantine", its characters, concepts and other indicia, which are the property of Francis Lawrence, Village Roadshow, Warner Brothers, DC Comics/Vertigo, et al. And I certainly don't own any of the demons.

"You can hide de fire, but what are you gonna do wiff de smoke?" --Joel Chandler Harris

Chapter Two: Under the Floorboards

Blaring music jolted Constantine out of a sound sleep. For a moment, he was back home in LA, with some punks testing the limits of the subwoofers on their car stereo below the windows of his apartment. But the hipsters and would-be hipsters usually didn't blare heavy metal from the Seventies.

He poked his head out from under the blankets and looked around him, getting his bearings. 'You're in Crowley's rooms,' he reminded himself.

The priest shifted on the bed, one arm reaching toward the nightstand, his hand fumbling for the clock radio perched on top. He shut the racket off, then lay still for a moment before sitting up.

"I'm sorry about that, John, I should have warned you," Crowley said, grinning sheepishly.

"Pretty funny music for a priest to have his radio tuned to," Constantine remarked.

"Ever since I had to start taking the sleeping pills, it's the only thing that'll wake me up," Crowley said, getting out of bed and kneeling on the floor beside it, to offer his morning prayers.

Constantine leaned back on his pillows as a wave of coughing wracked his chest. Crowley looked up, a pucker of concern between his brows.

"Are you all right there, John?"

"Yeah -- kaff! -- it just hits me like a pail of rocks when I first wake up."

"You might want to have that looked at," Crowley said, with a note of paternal concern.

"When I get back to LA," Constantine said, sitting up and reaching for his pants. Which might be fairly soon... he thought.

After a quick breakfast in the refectory, Crowley hurried Constantine away from the curious and suspicious looks from the other residents present in the dining hall, and led him back up to his rooms. Opening the door to a large cupboard in the far corner, Crowley took out a long, charcoal-black cassock.

"It's monk's wool: it'll keep you warm," Crowley said, with a slightly apologetic note as he handed the coat-like garment to Constantine.

He regarded it with some hesitancy before finally taking it and pulling it on. "People'll think I'm a priest."

"Or one of those strange 'Matrix' fankids," Crowley said.

Constantine winced. "Never saw it, and I'm too old for that." As a precaution, he left the front of the cassock unbuttoned.

.2.

The wide sidewalk in front of Sankt Maria Magdalena's Church and the narrow garden beside it were already lightly crowded with parishoners, talking amongst themselves, when Father Crowley dropped Constantine off. One Mass seemed to have gotten out, while another was about to start. He counted at least a dozen young families with several kids in tow or or scurrying around. No less than four of the mothers looked pregnant. 'Well, they won't fall short on Mallegant's baptism quota,' Constantine thought. As he passed through the gathereing, he caught several girls between the ages of 13 and 30 looking at him with surreptitious looks in their eyes, like they wanted to know his name and how it would look next to theirs on the parish marriage records. He walked a little quicker past them as he approached the steps to the front doors.

The interior smelled of wood polish, floor wax, incense and beeswax candles, but he detected something else, something that didn't belong here. It was just a whiff, not enough to warrant immediate intervention, but enough to twig his awareness.

He knelt in a pew towards the back of the church, behind a pillar where he could see without being seen, especially by the two older women who'd come in behind him, who at first had regarded him with smiles, but then on seeing his rumpled suit under that cassock, had changed their expressions to disapproving frowns.

He glanced across the aisle just as Natalie O'Halloran entered; her head covered with a black veil wound almost like a Muslim woman's hejab. She glanced up at him as she knelt down in a pew several rows ahead of his spot; a small smile of recognition crossed her face, but thankfully, she made no other sign that she knew he was there.

The Mass itself was decently said: the Gospel reading included a passage describing the torments that awaited self-condemned soul as "the weeping and gnashing of teeth", a fitting description, but it barely scratched the surface. The sermon, given by a youngish priest with prematurely thinning blonde hair, elaborated on "the reality of hell", but in Constantine's experience, it hardly came close to describing the horrors. The two older women whimpered on the verge of hysteria, but Constantine remained largely unmoved. He probably could have done better and used fewer words, but at best, they would have left much of the congregation shell-shocked. Which, all things considered, might not have been a bad thing: he spotted several people who had that air about them, that they needed to really see things from the other side. He got a vibe that a lot of the so-called respectable folks around him felt self-assured of their place on the straight and narrow. He certainly didn't envy them, if that was how they chose to spend their time on earth, sittin' pretty, when for all they knew, this holier-than-thou crap could well be the raw iron for the bolt on the gate of heaven when they got up there.

His mind wandered during much of the Mass. When the Priest elevated the Host, Constantine managed to refocus, going over the past few week, the interventions he'd made, the demons he'd pulled out of a couple of people, evening out the score with the Man Upstairs.

At Communion, he kept his head down while the majority of the congregation went up to receive the Body of Christ. He knew because of his own screw-ups, he couldn't receive the Sacred Species; that bothered him, but it didn't. He'd seen too many people eating the Bread of Heaven who shouldn't even set foot in a church, for the things they did to their fellow man, during the week. He sensed more than a few suspicious glares from the two eagle-eyed old women ahead of him, probably wondering what he'd done that kept him from going to Communion. Mind your own business, lady: nothin' to see here. Look to your own soul for a change, willya?

The organ postlude after the Mass was near-concert quality, oddly soothing to his vibrating nerves. He stayed put, keeping his eyes downcast, waiting for the congregation to file out. He felt a few people glance at him, probably thinking it was nice to see a young man praying on his knees in church on a Sunday morning. He wasn't a mind reader, but he got a vibe off some of these interlopers wanted to see a young man of their own aquaintence follow the example of the fine, young Catholic gentleman in front of them. He had to choke back his laughter at the absurdity of this notion: If only they knew him better...

Thankfully, he saw them go on their way, most likely turned off when they noticed his less than immaculate appearance: his unshaven jaw and still-tousled hair, or the smell of cigarette smoke that clung to him like an invisible garment.

The church emptied, except for a scattering of people praying the rosary after Mass, and the men from the Holy Name Society reciting the Litany of the Holy Name, in Latin:

"Ab Omni Malo... Libera nos Jesu"  
"Ab Omni Peccato... Libera nos Jesu"  
"Ab Insidus Diaboli... Libera nos Jesu."

From all evil... From all sin... From the snares of the devil... deliver us, Jesus.

Once the Holy Name Society had left, he felt someone put a hand on his arm. He pulled away and looked up to find Natalie at his side. "I hoped you'd come," she said.

He shrugged. "I had to get a look at the place."

He rose and walked to the front of the church, toward the sanctuary with its high altar, ornately decorated with carven angels in small niches, antique statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Christ with His Sacred Heart, in larger niches. Overhead, the ceiling -- once painted blue with gold stars, now peeling noticably -- rose to a pointed arch; the lathing had started to show through the aging plaster. Grey-green columns, nearly as thick as tree trunks, supported the roof; somewhere, he'd read a description of a Gothic church, comparing it to a forest. He couldn't place the reference, but the words fit: to the point that some would-be developers wanted to cut down this sacred grove.

He paused at the head of the banks of pews, just at the transverse aisle in front of the sanctuary. That odd scent had come back; he let his feelers reach out, prodding around, touching the aura of this place.

And he felt it, coming up through the tiles at his feet. It manifested as a weak aura: the corona of the Divine Presence in the tabernacle on the high altar, held it at bay, like an iron fence holding back a wild beast, or a sea wall holding back the waves. But it still lay in wait.

He looked down: on the floor at his feet, in the middle of the aisle, just before the center aisle leading to the front doors and the low wrought brass gates in the center of the altar rail, the tiles changed color. In the middle of the aged white tiles here, the designers had marked out a hollow black square out of narrow strips of tile, lined with alterating red and white tiles. Outside of the square, they had set in four red triangular tiles, at the corners of the square, apexes touching the corners of the square. He felt the negative aura the strongest here, within the square, held in by the Divine Order.

He sensed the evil presence surge, like a swarm of bees riled up by an intruder, but the swarm was held back, impotent to sting anyone. He murmured a line from the Ritual of Exorcism, "ISanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Domine Deus Sabaoth."/I Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts... The words forced the presence into calmness, but it did not fully disperse it. He knelt on the floor, reaching down to touch the tiles. To anyone else, they would have felt cool to the touch, but under his hand, they felt warm, even hot from the bleed-through emanating from the demonic plane. He projected his awareness deeper.

The demonic aura bucked at his touch. The yammer of a million harsh voices calling for blood, the clash of a million fanged jaws lusting for fresh meat rose in the ears of his soul.

He retracted his awareness, opening his eyes as he stood up. He knew now why he had to be here, why he had been called to this particular place. Like hell he knew it.

He turned to find Natalie standing behind him; she'd clearly been watching him the whole time. She held one hand clasped in a loose fist before her, below her chin, an odd gesture, but she'd confessed to being a little odd.

"Did you find something?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, wondering for a moment how to describe it, or if he should share it with her at all.

At that point, a slim figure in black cassock, the young priest who had offered the Mass, emerged from behind the high altar, pausing to kneel briefly before it, then turned and approached them, opening the gate in the altar rail.

"Good morning, Natalie," the priest said.

"Good morning, Father," she replied.

"Did you get a chance to speak with Father Crowley?" the priest asked.

Natalie nodded. "Yes, I did: he said he'd like to help, but he isn't able to. Bishop Mallegant might throw him out of his position, but he said he'd call in someone he knows, someone who can take the case --"

Constantine stepped in between Natalie and the priest. He had to butt in before this chatterbox blew his cover.

"Excuse me, Father," he said. "I'm here in Houlton on business for a few days. Friend of mine told me about this church, said it was a really good place, had a good Mass. I gotta admit, it's gorgeous here: place like this has to have quite a history to it."

"Oh, it's quite a long story," the priest said.

Constantine shrugged. "I got time to hear it."

"Well, in that case... the parish was organized in 1836, to serve the needs of the German immigrants coming here from Bavaria, the Catholic province of Germany. But the present structure wasn't built until 1868. Before that, a wooden frame building stood on this spot, but that burned to the ground in 1858," the priest replied.

"Yeah, the Know-Nothings torched it, along with another church and a convent in Brighton," Natalie put in.

"The... what-whos?" Constantine asked.

"The Know-Nothings. They were the forerunners of the White Supremecist movement. They didn't like Blacks or foreigners like the immigrants coming in, so they did what they could to drive them out. Basically, they were terrorists, but they used other scare tactics, too. The ones who owned businesses refused to hire immigrants, while the rowdier members trashed and burned buildings where the immigrants gathered. They got their name from the reply they'd give to anyone who asked them what their political affiliation was; they'd say something like, 'I know nothing'." She said the last three words in an almost sarcastic, nasal tone.

"Pretty damned stupid of them -- sorry, Father. I mean, these people where, what, guys whose great-grandfathers came over on the Mayflower, right?" Constantine said.

"Yeah, and now our own bishop wants to shut us down," Natalie said. "Personally, I'd rather this place got wrecked by people who hate us, than see it get killed by one of our own kind."

"Guess if I want a look around, I'd better take my chance now," Constantine said.

"Would you care to join us for the social hour we're having downstairs in the parish hall?" the priest asked.

"Thanks, but I'll take a raincheck: I'm just passing through," Constantine said.

"You take care then, and God be with you, brother," the priest said, then went on his way, heading down the main aisle and out by the front doors.

Constantine breathed an uneasy sigh of relief. Then turning to Natalie, he said, "Do me a favor, will you?"

"What?" she asked, eyes open and innocent.

"Don't try to help me out here. I know what I'm doing. Last thing I need on my hands right now is some well-intentioned bystander getting in the middle and blowing this all to hell."

Her face visably crinkled with frustration. "I'm sorry... I thought I could help."

"You can help best by not helping. I can see you want to help because this is your parish; but it's better for us all if you keep your mouth shut and let me do what I gotta do."

She edged away, her hands trembling. "I'm sorry..."

He realized he'd agitated her. "Look, I'm not saying this to be nasty to you: I'm trying to keep you out of the worst. It's a war zone."

She seemed to be forcing herself to breathe more slowly. "I'm sorry," she said, a little less fearfully.

"Hey, I know you meant well -- "

"I mean, I'm sorry I got upset: I tend to overreact to stuff, things people say to me."

He shrugged. "Didn't faze me; it's hard to bug me, after the things I've seen." He made a small mental note to watch his mouth around her, to avoid a repeat of this confrontation.

.3.

"She means well, yeah, but the last thing I need right now is a nosy girl messin' with my work," Constantine said, sitting perched on a windowsill in Crowley's room, a cigarette between his fingers. He took a pull from it and blew the smoke out, over the lowered upper sash.

"Aside from that, did you find anything there?" Crowley asked, putting his Mass kit away on its shelf.

"Hell, yeah." He took a meditative pull off his cigarette, holding the smoke before letting it trickle from his lips. "I'll have to take a closer look, but right now, I'll tell you this much: If that church comes down, it's gonna be hell on earth."

"What exactly do you mean?" Crowley said, his voice hinting that he had an idea of what Constantine meant.

"It's on top of a hellhole: felt it right through the floorboards." Constantine stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray Crowley had scared up for him.

"Holy Mother, protect us," Crowley murmured.

"No turnin' back now," Constantine said.

To Be Continued...

Literary Easter Eggs:

The heavy metal music on the radio -- Inspired by a crazy story about an older priest who was losing his hearing, and who had his clock radio set to the heavy metal station because that was the only thing loud enough to wake him up.

The cassock -- A playful dig toward the "Matrix" fan crowd, and toward the nuts at Warner Brothers for putting the "Constantine" movie poster on a billboard visible in one of the Matrix Online trailers.

The odd design on the floor before the sanctuary -- Inspired by a purely decorative design in a similar spot on the floor of Holy Trinity (German) Catholic Church. The operative words here are 'purely decorative'. As far as I know, there's nothing nasty under the floorboards of my parish church. 


	4. 3: Creeping Around the Basement

+J.M.J.+

The Smoke of Satan in Your House

by "Matrix Refugee"

Rating: T (spiritually mature themes, language)

Warnings: None for this chapter, aside from references to demonic activity, and Constantine's usual cussing.

Author's Note: I'm typing this chapter just after hearing that the dioceasan exorcist in my area just retired. Considering the story that I'm writing and where I got the inspiration, that was a little close to home, if you ask me.

Disclaimer: I don't own "Constantine", its characters, concepts and other indicia, which are the property of Francis Lawrence, Village Roadshow, Warner Brothers, Dc Comics/Vertigo, et al. And I certainly don't own any of the demons.

Chapter Three: Creeping Around the Basement

Later that evening, Constantine made a collect call on Crowley's phone, to Beeman, the arcane scholar who'd helped him on more than a few occasions; he had to find out what was up with that hotspot under the floorboards at Sankt Maria's. The line rang almost a dozen times before it finally picked up.

"Hello?" Beeman's quietly nervous voice replied, on the other end of the line.

"Hey, it's me, Constantine."

"Ah, I see you made it to Massachusetts in one piece."

"Barely. Listen, I got some research I need you to run for me. Look in the scrolls, the annals, anything you can get your hands on. I need to know everything you can find about Sankt Maria Magdalena German Catholic Church, in Houlton, or about any hotspots in the area. Anything that stinks of Hell."

"I'll see what I can find, but the annals tend to be generalized. You might need to look around the local libraries where you are."

"Just see what you can come up with, drop me a word when you do."

"All right, John, but I can't make any guarantees," Beeman said.

They exchanged goodbyes and hung up.

Crowley looked up from reading the evening newspaper. "Do you want some back-up on this? I've got some friends in the chancery."

"No, you said yourself it could cost you your job," Constantine said. "Besides, what would you tell them, 'Hey, you can't close Sankt Maria's and tear it down: it's sitting on top of a interdimensional portal. You knock down that building and the demons will come pouring out like the bats out of hell that they are'. Mallegant wouldn't just kick you out, he'd have you committed to a mental hospital."

"Okay. Just tell me, how do you plan to stop that building from coming down?" Crowley asked.

Constantine reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. "I'm working on that. I just gotta put a name to the demons first."

.2.

Next morning, Crowley dropped Constantine off at Sankt Maria's, as he headed to the chancery office for the morning. The Nine a.m, Mass was in progress when he arrived, so he slipped into the back of the church to avoid being noticed by anyone.

After Mass, while a group of women, including one woman who appeared to be Natalie, a few older men, and young kids -- probably homeschoolers -- gathered at the front of the church to pray the rosary, Constantine slipped out to find a way into the basement of the building.

He stepped out into the garden to the right of the church; a set of wide flagstone steps recessed into the ground, led from the terrace down to a basement level entrance. He descended the stairs and tried the double doors; finding them unlocked, he lifted the latch of one and let himself in.

A wainscotted entryway gave onto a large but low-ceilinged common area with a number of folding tables and chairs, clearly the parish hall. Beyond it, a set of glass and metal doors led into a small chapel, probably used for small weddings, or Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Both sections were well-lit for a basement: the sunlight streamed in through old-fashioned floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows. The parish hall clearly was once part of the chapel, until someone had rennovated the basement level.

As he crossed the hall, he reached out, testing the aura of the place. He sensed the same vile presence he had felt yesterday, the scent of hell lingering on the air, even in this holy place. As he pushed open the doors into the chapel and entered, the presence grew stronger. The hotspot was closer here, he could feel its vile energies emanating from the wall in back of the altar. The tabernacle did not contain the Sacred Species, and thus he did not see the Divine Presence, but he sensed the grace of merit emanating from the martyrs' bones within the altar stone, filling the hole in the sea wall between earth and hell, holding back the demonic waves.

He stepped behind the altar, into the small sacristy behind it. The hellish aura grew stronger still, until it seemed a palpable force, the demonic voices yattering and screeching, the stink of sulphur and burning flesh filling his nostrils. The evil presences hurled themselves forward, trying to assault him, but the aura of the martyrs' merits held them back.

"Depart, then, impious one; depart, accursed one; depart with all your deceits, for God has willed that man should be His temple!" he ordered, quoting the Ritualis. He hiked down his sleeves, uncovering the sigils tattooed on the insides of his wrists. The demonic aura pulsed as the evil prescences screamed at his reproach, then feel back to a dull murmur.

'It's right back there,' he thought, surveying the stretch of wall before him. 'Right there, that's the living rock between us and them...' Maybe he just imagined the crude cross in the grain of the panelling. Maybe someone had traced it there...

As he emerged into the sunlight and the slush, Constantine spotted Natalie walking through the garden, clearly on her way somewhere after the rosary. He started walking away more quickly than before, but she glanced in his direction and sharply changed her course.

"I thought I'd find you here," she said.

"You were hoping you would," he replied, pausing, waiting for her to catch up.

"I probably was: You didn't get a chance to tell me what you'd found out," she said.

"After the way you started to flip out yesterday, I'm not sure if I should."

"I'm in a better frame of mind."

He looked around, making sure no one was watching or listening, then stepped closer to her. "All right," he said, then lowering his voice, asked, "You know that square-shaped design in the tiles in front of the sanctuary?"

"Yeah, I'd always wondered why they'd put that there," she said.

"It's right over a hell-mouth, a hotspot, a weakness between the human plane and the demonic plane, between earth and hell." He waited for her response, expecting her to flip out. Or to flap out, the way he'd seen some autistics respond to a bad fright, during the year he'd spent in Ravenscar's mental ward, during his teen years.

"That sounds almost like something out of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'," she said, trying to joke. Her hand rose in that loose clenched-fist gesture, but thankfully, she made no other response. "Y' know, I'd had some wierd feelings about that spot, but I'd never been able to put my finger on it. I never was able to walk across it without getting this feeling like an electric shock."

"Now, you said you wanted to help; I think I might have something for you to do," he said. "How good are you at researching stuff?"

She grinned broadly. "How good am I at research? How good is Johnny Damon at hitting baseballs or Curt Schilling at throwing them? What do you need?"

"I need you to help me look up anything on this hotspot, anything at all, in local history, arcane studies, what-have-you. I'm heading to the library later on to see what I can find," Constantine said. "I'm no good at research, never was."

"I'd be glad to help," she said.

"Good. You busy today?"

"I'm working, but I'll be off work at five. Do you want me to meet you at the Houlton Public Library?"

"Sure thing. See you after five." With that, he went on his way

.3.

When Constantine and Crowley returned to the residence, they met Ursula lurking behind the door, standing over Constantine's missing suitcase. Her small eyes burned with anger. "They just delivered something that belongs to you, Mr. John Constantine," she said. "And I got something else for you."

She took a small metal crucifix on a chain from around her neck and slapped it against Constantine's chest. An annoyed expletive rose to his lips, but he managed to hold his tongue.

"Ursula, there's no need for that," Crowley said.

"Of course there is," she snapped. "They say he's in league with the devils, that's how he binds 'em."

"Who told you that?" Constantine asked.

"There was a piece in the 'Remnant' about people like you. They listed you among some strange people who'd been doing exorcisms, even though they aren't priests."

"Ursula, that's enough: he's on our side," Crowley ordered.

The old woman glared at them both, then went away, darting an evil look at them, over her shoulder.

"Miserable old bitch," Constantine muttered, picking up his suitcase and following Crowley upstairs.

"I was afraid something like that would happen," Crowley said, once they were alone in his rooms. "I'm sorry about that."

"Nah, no need to be," Constantine said. "I expected worse, actually. You heard about the woman with the six-month old? She pressed kidnapping charges on me when Hennessey and I pulled Legion out of her kid."

"Yes, I read about that on the Internet," Crowley said. "I know you were trying to do what you're down here to do, but you crossed the line of human law that time. You could have gotten locked up for that stunt."

He plunked the suitcase down by the couch. "It had to be done and there was no other way. For all it's worth... I mean, I certainly don't expect people to kiss my feet, but 'Hey, thanks for keeping my kid from turnin' into Lucifer's middleman on earth,' would be nice to hear once in a little while."

"It comes with the territory, John. I've had people slam doors in my face. One woman's father threatened me with a shotgun, which thanks be to God turned out to be unloaded. I even had a woman messed up with black magic try putting a binding charm on me when I was trying to liberate her nephew; that's when my hair went white and the nightmares started."

Constantine sank down on the sofa. "Yeah, but you're doing this work because you chose it. The damn job chose me."

"You've got a gift, John--" Crowley started to say.

"Pardon my putting it this way, but if that's the case, then your Boss has a knack for giving people really bad gifts."

Crowley parted his lips to object, then laid a finger over them, pausing, clearly choosing the right words. "I can hear you're angry with God, but you have to let that go before it eats you alive."

Constantine shrugged, then shucked Crowley's cassock. "I'm suckin' it up, same as I always do."

.4.

Later that afternoon, the phone rang. Constantine, dozing on the couch, pulled himself up to answer it, but a fit if coughing nearly floored him.

Crowley, typing up a report on his laptop, reached for the phone and answered it. "Hello, Father Martin Crowley speaking... Yes, he's here." Off line, he added, "John, it's your friend Beeman."

"I'm on the way--kaff, kaff!" Constantine managed, his chest starting to burn. He reached for and took the handset Crowley held out to him. "Hey--kaff!"

"You all right there, John?" Beeman's voice asked, on the other end of the line.

"Yeah, I'll be all right. That cough that's buggin' me floors me if I've been laying down. You find anything?"

"There wasn't much, I'm afraid. The annals tend to be localised and the scrolls didn't tell me anything more than you'd already know. You might want to start taking a look in the local libraries."

"Don't sweat it, Beeman, you did what you could. I got someone on that now," Constantine replied.

Constantine switched off the phone and handed it back to Crowley. A door had been slammed in his face, but hopefully Natalie and her research could help him find an open window...

.5.

At five-twenty, Constantine stood huddled under the portico of the Houlton Public Library, smoking to keep warm and cursing the New England winter, the collar of his trenchcoat turned up against the biting wind that whipped around the grey stone building and found its way into what should have been a sheltered nook. He was about to give up and walk back to the residency, when Natalie came running up the steps to meet him.

"I'm sorry I'm late: the traffic was bad and it slowed down my bus," she said.

"Well, at least you made it before I got turned into an icicle," he said, stubbing out his cigarette.

She led the way inside, through the inner doors and around a corner to a staircase leading to the mezzanine level stacks. She clearly knew the place like the back of her hand.

"So what are we looking for?" she asked.

"Any books, anything dealing with strange things happening in the area," he said, shrugging.

"Okay... let's try the arcane section, in the 001's," she said, leading the way to the right section.

They found several books on the Salem Witch Trials and a few books on ghost ships and other sea-related spooks, but nothing that looked likely. Natalie changed their course and led him up a twisting metal staircase -- little more than a glorified metal ladder with handrails added as an after-thought -- to the local history section, which occupied a reading room all its own. Up here, they found several comb-bound book on wierd things that had happened (house-hauntings, poltergeists, vampirism) in and around Houlton, but there was no mention of a hellmouth.

"Dammit," Constantine muttered, leaning back in his chair. "Everything else but the hotspot."

"I'm frustrated too," Natalie said, her fist clenching, but not rising.

He gazed across the reading room, trying to get his mind off the nicotine cravings starting to gnaw at him. His eye fell on a yellowed newspaper lying on a table. "Old newspapers," he said, an idea coming to him.

"They've got two hundred-ten years of the Houlton Herald archived on microfilm here," Natalie said, getting up. "Let me find the reference librarian."

An hour later found them sitting in front of the library's microfilm reader. Natalie scrolled through the plates of pages, while Constantine looked over her shoulder, scanning the headlines, when she didn't run the plates too fast. They started in the most likely place, around the time the church had been burned, starting with that item in particular:

"The German Papist Church Burns in A Mysterious Fire"

"On the night of Friday, the 12th of April, Mr. James Metcalfe, owner of a ready-made clothing emporium on Sweetley Street, was retiring for the night in his rooms above his shop, when he happened to look out a window facing the German Papist Church which is situated across the street from his place of business. He noticed then that the windows of the church were lit up, which at first he took to indicate that the Papists were holding some midnight ceremonies. But then he smelled smoke, as of a great fire, and on running out into the street, discovered that a fire had broken out in the church and was consuming one of the walls of the structure."

The article didn't do much more than expand on what Natalie and the parish priest had already told him. But one paragraph caught his attention:

"In the wreckage of the building, the remains of Father Yohan Miller was found lying between the table and the benches, a half-charred beam fallen across his back. Even in death, he still clung to a golden vessal which the surviving cleric, Father Hinereck Shtosser claims contained the Lord's Bread. The members of the parish have applied to the Papist bishop for the necessary funds to rebuild the church. For the time being, the members will hold their ceremonies at the French church of Saint John Dark, which is located nearby on Winthrop Street."

"Funny they should mention Ste. Jeanne D'Arc's," Natalie said. "We've been told that we might be combining with them, once the closing goes through. There's just one big problem with that: the altar isn't really Tridentine Mass-friendly, the table is flush with the top level of the plinth in the sanctuary, and that way there's no place for the priest to stand in front of the altar to offer the Mass."

"Doesn't tell me a whole lot more than we already knew," he said, taking out his smokes and tapping one out of the pack, just to have something in his hands. "Try scrolling to the next issue."

"Consider it done," Natalie said, scrolling forward. Constantine turned his attention to the fillers at the bottom of the columns this time, looking for anything likely.

"Hey, there," he said, pointing to a small item, in an issue dated a week after the fire.

"The Devil Walks In Houlton"

"A Woman attended a charity ball held Saturday, the 20 th of April, at the Odd Fellows' Hall, arriving without a male companion to guide her. On entering the place, a tall, red-haired gentleman in a black greatcoat approached her, and with a great many flowery words and witty compliments, offered to accompany her for the evening. She found him so comely of appearance, that she hardly noticed that he spoke with an accent which indicated he was a foreigner, nor did she take note that no one else attending the gathering seemed to recognize or even take much note of him.

"After the ball, the woman's companion offered to escort her back to her home, but in stead of taking her straightaway to her lodgings, the foreigner led her down a secluded alleyway and attempted to get her into a comprimising situation. She struggled against him, beating him with her reticule and crying out for help. When the foreigner had nearly overpowered her, a Papist priest from the German church happened by, on returning from attending the deathbed of a parish member. At his approach, the foreigner emitted a loud cry which the woman and her rescuer both described as sounding like the combined sounds of a donkey braying and an injured dog yelping. The foreigner's greatcoat transformed itself into a pair of great, black leathern wings with which he took flight over the rooftops, leaving behind a terrible sulphurous stench."

There were other items in the same issue: reports of chickens and dogs and other small animals being found horribly mauled; several cases of inexplicable mental illness; unexplained house fires.

It all added up to the kind of total Constantine expected: a few demons must have slipped through onto the human plane. But the priest must have offered his life as a sacrifice, to keep the worst from breaking through.

"Almost exactly what I needed to know," Constantine said, thinking out loud.

"What I'd like to know is how it got there in the first place," Natalie said.

"It'd be good information to have on hand, but I've got enough information to get started," Constantine said, sticking the cigarette between his lips. "Come on, let's get out of here."

To Be Continued...

Literary Easter Eggs:

The 'Remnant' -- An ultra-conservative Catholic newspaper, which tends to veer off into some wierd directions once in a while. If I take the occasional pot-shot at ultra-conservatives, it's because they make orthodox/moderate conservative people like myself look bad.

"Papist" -- an old and somewhat perjorative term for a Catholic. It's like calling a Jewish person a Yid or a kike. 


	5. 4: Nipping out for Supplies

+J.M.J.+

The Smoke of Satan in Your House

by "Matrix Refugee"

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: None for this chapter, aside from references to demonic activity, Constantine's usual cussing, and a sickening moment when Constantine's health starts to take a turn for the worse (I was riffing from Issue 41 of the comic book series, found in the compilation "Dangerous Habits").

Author's Note: Sorry for the delay: I've been working extra at my regular job, since I had an unexpected medical bill to pay... Before I go any further with this chapter, I have some good news to share: my parish, the model for Sankt Maria Magdalena, has been granted a reprieve until December 15th, 2005 (I know, what a stupid date: couldn't they wait till after New Year's Day?). Today, June 30th, is the day it was supposed to have closed; we still got more arm-twisting to do, but we've got some leverage behind us that could tip this in our favor, please God.

Disclaimer: I don't own "Constantine", its characters, concepts and other indicia, which are the property of Francis Lawrence, Village Roadshow, Warner Brothers, DC Comics/Vertigo, et al. And I certainly don't own any of the demons.

Chapter Four: Nipping out for Supplies

"I doubt the chancery library would have anything close to what you're looking for," Crowley said, frying eggs in a skillet over his "illegal" hotplate the next morning. "The Boston Public Library might be a more likely place to look."

"You ever been there running research?" Constantine asked, tying his shoes.

"I've poked around there a few times when I needed to," Crowley replied.

"I take it you never had to deal with a hotspot before," Constantine said.

"It's the first time I've heard of one in this area," Crowley said.

"You don't sound suprised by it, or are you just getting hardened to it, like me?"

Crowley turned the eggs out onto a plate. "That could be part of it, but it seems to me that a hotspot would be right in keeping with the area. There's all sorts of stories floating about New England, about ghost ships and sailors returning home who'd been lost at sea, and captains' widows who had special talents. There's a dead zone out in the Berkshires, where birds won't nest in the trees and animals won't go in; local stories say that it was the site of a farmstead back in the 1700s, or at least it was until a man went mad and apparantly killed his entire family before killing himself. Up near Bennington, Vermont, there's a strange spot in the woods that's a twin to the Bermuda Triangle, only a lot smaller."

"Don't forget the shit that went down in Salem," Constantine said, finding the carton of Lucky Strikes he'd bought the night before, and taking out a fresh pack.

"Actually, that happened in what's now Danvers, and according to one local forensic investigator, it was most likely a case of mass ergot poisoning, when several families ate bread made from rye that had been contaminated with a fungus that grows on it during a wet, warm growing season," Crowley said.

"There were a few who were the real thing, the ones who got away," Constantine said.

"You've been doing your homework, I take it?"

"Bit of information that caught my eye last night: I'd always wondered about Salem," Constantine said, lighting up his second cigarette of the day. "Didn't surprise me: there's always a guilty party or two who let the innocent folks get the sharp end of the stick."

"Don't tell me you think there's a connection," Crowley said, cracking two more eggs into the skillet.

Constantine shrugged and let a plume of smoke trail from his lips. "Could just be a fluke. Salem -- excuse me -- Danvers is just a few towns over."

Crowley set the first plate of eggs on the table, nudging it toward Constantine. "Here, there's something to keep you going while you're following that fluke.

At that moment, someone knocked at the door. Crowley turned down the eggs and went to answer the knock. He came back a moment later with a sheaf of mail and a rumpled newspaper.

"Pardon the condition of the Clarion," Crowley said, laying the rumpled paper, that week's issue of the dioceasan newspaper, on the table. "Things got so tight here, we're kind of sharing it here at the residency." From the dog-eared state of the pages and the rings on the back page, it clearly had had more than one reader already.

Constantine unfolded the paper and scanned the headlines idly. The main headline caught a corner of his attention: "Bishop Mallegant Hires Financial Advisor, Real Estate Broker To Balance Books". Below it were a few inches of type and a photograph of the bishop talking with a tall, distinguished-looking man with neatly brushed reddish hair and clad in a long jacket that had to be Armani. "Bishop Benjamin Mallegant converses with Marcel Mephis, a financial advisor brought in to bring order to the Houlton diocease's accounts and to manage the sales of diocesan property."

Something about the image twigged Constantine's awareness. He scanned the accompanying article more closely.

"...the bishop met with Marcel Mephis, a top-ranking certified public accountant and real estate broker in the employ of West Coast-based BZR Enterprises, an investment firm which has successfully assisted several large corporations through times of financial difficulty."

BZR Enterprises... that place was crawling with demons in human form. One of its top executives was in reality a demon named Balthazar, the black beast of Constantine's existence, who'd been hounding him for years, interfering with his cases.

"Martin... you still got that black glass mirror?" Constantine asked. "I think I've got something here."

"Yes, just give me a minute to find it," Crowley said, turning the eggs onto a plate and going to the cupboard. "Ursula was cleaning some time back and tried to toss it out on me. I had to hide it a little better. Let's hope I didn't hide it from myself."

After a few moments of poking around on the lower shelves, Crowley came up with round piece of glass in a tarnished silver frame, one side of the glass painted black, the other side was clear.

Constantine smoothed the newspaper flat on the table. Crowley held the mirror over it, glossy side down.

"Do you think it'll work?" Crowley asked, adjusting the angle. "It's only a newspaper photograph."

"It's worth a shot," Constantine said, peering under the edge of the glass.

He saw the photograph dimly reflected on the dark surface, the text reversed. But to his eyes, the image had changed: Mallegant's image looked blurred and distorted. Seven pairs of eyes that weren't his seemed to be looking out of his face. The other male in the photograph was almost completely blurred out.

"Damn," Constantine muttered.

Crowley set the mirror on the table top. "Holy Mother of mercy..." he said, under his breath. "The Grappin is all over him, inside and out."

"So what do you suggest we do? Try a deliverance the next time you meet him at a council meeting?" Constantine asked. "You're the one who kept saying you couldn't get involved."

"Do what you need to do, John," Crowley said. "Have you planned anything yet?"

"Not till I put a name to the demon who's master-minding it." He tapped the picture of Mallegant and Mephis. "I got an idea which one, but if I'm right, I'm dealin' with a heavy-hittin' bastard. I'll need some heavy artillery for this one."

"Not the shotgun," Crowley said, with a touch of incredulity, which Constantine expected.

"I guess I'll have to nip back to LA and bring it back. Scratch that: I'll have to call Beeman and have him overnight mail it out here."

"There's one problem, John: You can't ship guns into Massachusetts unless you're a dealer based in the state," Crowley warned.

"Damn. There any neighboring states that are any more gun-friendly?" Constantine asked.

"You could ship it to a postal box in New Hampshire. Let me set that up for you."

"Hey, I thought you said you weren't getting involved?" Constantine demanded, with a smirk.

Crowley shrugged. "I'm setting up a postal box, not trying to exorcise Mallegant's demons."

Constantine grinned crookedly, and took a final pull from his burned-down cigarette. "You can't resist the hunt any more than I can."

"I'm just doing you a good turn," Crowley said.

.2.

While Crowley set about opening the postal box in Salem, New Hampshire -- conveniently located just over the state line -- Constantine made his arrangements to fly back to LA the next morning.

Five o'clock that evening found Constantine huddled in the shelter of the Houlton commuter rail station. A light snow had started to fall, but even his trench coat and a thermal undershirt Crowley had given him couldn't keep the icy breeze from gnawing at him. Natalie hadn't shown up yet, and at five-fifteen, five minutes before the next train into Boston was supposed to arrive, he was about to leave, when she came running up the platform.

"Sorry I'm late: The road was icy and that slowed down my bus," she said, panting.

He shrugged and dropped the stub of his cigarette on the pavement, grinding it out with his heel. "Hey, ...stuff like that happens," he said, reminding himself to soft-pedal it around this girl.

The train arrived ten minutes later, and their progress was slowed due to the snow. Someone was working overtime throwing curveballs at his head, Constantine thought. Once they were seated, Natalie took a worn wooden bead rosary from her inside pocket and silently started praying, the beads slipping through her fingers. Constantine turned to watch the scenery slipping past them, but the blur of snow and the layer of grime on the window pane blocked his view.

"Have you heard the latest news about what Mallegant is up to?" Natalie asked.

Constantine shrugged himself out of the light doze he'd slipped into. "What... about him gettin' the financial advisor?"

"Yes... I saw the picture of him in the Clarion: I don't like the looks of the advisor at all," she said.

"Neither did I," Constantine said.

"May I ask why?" she asked.

"Sure, but I can't answer that here," he said, looking around at the other passengers.

A look crossed her eyes like she might pest him for the answer, but thankfully, she dropped her gaze and went back to praying her rosary.

.3.

Of course the arcane section of the Boston Public Library lacked the grimoires and silver-strapped tomes that Constantine had found whole running similar research in Rome and London, during his training in his twenties, but it still contained dozens of thick scholarly books, more than they needed, as he and Natalie found out once they started. Unfortunately, it also had a lot of dust, which inflamed Constantine's lungs, setting him coughing.

At length, Natalie found a set of several crumbling leather-bound books on a lower shelf: "An History of Supernatural & Diabolical Phenomena in the New England States", which appeared to cover everything from the Salem Witch Hunts to house-hauntings in the late 1800's. While Natalie continued to peer at the other titles, he pored over one volume of the set, covering the 1850's.

His gaze scanned idly down the columns of small, antique typeface. He never really cared much for research: the thrill of the hunt held his attention more readily. Generally, he preferred to have someone else scout out the information, running reconnaissence while he went in and mopped up, but Beeman hadn't called with anything he'd turned up, which left Constantine in the dark. And this gave Natalie something to do, hopefully to keep her out from underfoot when the mop-up started.

The name "Saint Mary Magdalen" on the bottom of one page caught his eye. He read the paragraphs above it, realizing he'd found exactly what they needed. It seemed there was more to the Know-Nothings than mere anarchist statements: one member, Boaz Ryder, had been messing with black magic and in so doing, had made contact with Mefistofel, a fallen archangel, which apparently had promised to help Ryder out of some gambling debts he'd racked up, if Ryder could get his Know-Nothing cronies to burn Sankt Maria's. Putting two and two together, it seemed Mefistofel wanted to uncork that hell-hole, but he habn't counted on the priest who died in the blaze to tip the balance the other way...

"Holy shit," he murmured.

"Hmm?" Natalie asked, looking up from a bottom shelf, which she knelt before, scanning titles, a handkerchief tucked under the bridge of her eyeglasses, covering her nose and mouth against the dust. "Did you find anything?"

"Nothing short of the goddamned Un-Holy Grail," Constantine said, turning the book around and pushing it toward her. She took it and read over it in a low murmur, as if she were thinking out loud.

"Mefistofel..." Natalie murmured, snatching the handkerchief from her face and squeezing it as her hand started to shake in that wierd gesture. "Mephis... Oh God."

"Damn, you thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?" Constantine asked.

"That financial advisor Mallegant hired..." Natalie murmured.

"Probably no less than that same fallen angel," Constantine said, taking the book from her and shoving it back into it'sn space on the shelf.

"But how did that hole get there in the first place?" Natalie said.

"It'd be interesting to know, but it ain't necessary," Constantine said. "What's important -- for me at least -- is to know what demon I'm dealing with, put a name on the dragon. I'm guessin' Mefistofel sent those smaller demons to infect Mallegant, blind him to what was really going on, and spy on him. Kinda like a preternatural wire-tap on the bishop's mind and soul. Demons can't make you do anything, but they can read your mind once they're in you, and they can play on your fears."

"This is scary," Natalie said.

"The hell it is," Constantine said, rising from the short step ladder he perched on and tucking a hand under her shoulder, pulling her up off the floor. "Come on, we got what we need.

She made no objection as he led her out: she seemed a little shocky, but that was to be expected. At least she wasn't spazzing out.

.4.

The snow had stopped by the time they emerged from the building, but a cold wind whipped through the brownstone canyon around them, threatening to freeze them before they got to the MTA subway entrance a few blocks away. Constantine quickened his pace, taking care not to start coughing again. Natalie, at his side, kept her head down, clearly a veteran of many an icy winter blast. She seemed apprehensive, but she could have been wrapped up in her thoughts.

A couple approached them, emerging from a pool of darkness up ahead where a street light had gone out: a young woman in a fur coat with her hand resting on the arm of a tall man in a ground-sweeping black coat.

Something about the guy caused Constantine's awareness to set off alarm bells in his head. He hustled Natalie into the doorway of a closed gift shop. She squawked in wordless objection, but Constantine shushed her, pushing her back against the door and covering her so that he faced out. "We've got company."

The couple passed by their hiding place. The man peered over his companion's head, looking into the doorway. Constantine glimpsed the guy's long-nosed, leonine face, but they passed by too quickly for him to get a good look at the interloper. But he could taste the demonic aura that flowed off the stranger in waves that weakened, doppler-effect style, as he passed out of sight.

Constantine mentally counted to sixty, keeping his awareness wide-open, in case the stranger returned.

Natalie, under his arm, emitted a small questioning chirp; he felt her trembling against him.

"It's all right: he's gone," he said, stepping out of the doorway.

She peered around cautiously before emerging. "I smelled him."

"So did I," he said. "Worse."

Natalie took his hand in hers, holding herself against him the rest of the way to the subway entrance. Normally, Constantine would have gently pushed her off, but she clearly needed someone to hang onto.

.5.

By noon the next day, Constantine was on board a flight back to LA, reminding himself not to reach for his smokes for the next four hours. The impulses came more strongly, perhaps as a reaction to the numbness threatening to creep into his being, not from last night's encounter -- he'd had far nastier experiences and come out no worse for the wear. Something else had happened between last night and now, which in some ways made those experiences fade by comparison.

He'd woken up, that morning, before Crowley's clock radio went off. He'd just sat up and started reaching for the pack on the endtable, when a wave of coughing had hit him so hard, it practically choked him. Not the usual dry hacking: this felt almost the way it had when he'd had double pneumonia as a kid, only he sure as hell didn't have it now. Aside from the cough, he felt the same way he always did. He covered his mouth with both hands, to catch whatever was coming up. But instead of the bland non-taste of phlegm, he tasted something bitter and metallic on his tongue.

He looked into his hand to find a splotch of red in his palm. Blood. Where the hell had it come from? He couldn't have bitten his tongue in the night, it was way too much for that. He got up and headed for the washroom to clean the blood off his hands. Whatever it was, it was probably not going to clear up by noon time...

He stuck his hands under the faucet and ran warm water over them. As he stood there, another coughing spasm wracked his chest. He leaned over the sink, spitting blood into the basin.

A third fit hit him. Something seemed to have caught in his throat, choking him. He stood there retching, until after a momentary eternity, he felt it loosen and drop from his open mouth.

A pulpy, pinkish-grey mass dropped into the basin. He stared down at the nameless clot, wondering what the hell it was, if it was something Mefistofel could have infected him with. He didn't sense the aura, which could mean only one thing: he'd coughed up part of himself.

His coughing must have awakened Crowley. He heard the older man's footsteps behind him, entering the washroom. Crowley approached, peering over Constantine's shoulder, his face grave.

"Merciful saviour..." he murmured. "You'd better have that cough checked out by a doctor when you get to LA, John."

"I'm in the middle of a job," Constantine said. "I'll make an appointment when this mess is over."

Crowley looked at him gravely. "You'd better do that: something like this happened to an uncle of mine, shortly before he died. The doctors told us it was cancer." With that, he stepped out of the washroom.

Whatever this was, he'd just have to hack along till he could see a specialist. He was used to hauling an injury around: cracked ribs, a sprained wrist, scratches, bites, bruises. The hazards of the profession. Constantine was used to it by now, used to treating himself. Try going to the emergency room with a three-inch gash in your arm and explaining to the nurse why you smelled like sulphur and burning garbage.

He leaned back in his seat, his fists bunched in his pockets, gritting his teeth and waiting for this wretched flight to land in LA.

Once on the ground, once he got through check-out, he never felt so relieved to see Chas's battered "City of Angels" cab pull up to the curb outside the main terminal.

"Heya, John: how's the job goin'?" Chas asked as Constantine crawled into the back seat.

"So far so good," Constantine said, reaching for the pack he'd bought in Manchester. "How's things been hangin' here?"

"Pretty quiet, except for your little gal-pal in Sacramento gettin' shook up," Chas said, pulling away from the curb and weaving through the traffic that clogged the roadways.

"You keepin' her out of trouble?" Constantine asked, lighting up.

"I've been patchin' her up, holdin' her hand when she needs it," Chas said, trying to sound flippant and failing; the slightly sheepish smirk crossing his young face, visible in the rearview mirror, made a liar out of him, but Constantine ignored it. "So what's goin' down in Boston?"

"Houlton," Constantine corrected. "It's goin' like a snowball on a hill in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Crowley called me out because some girl smelled demons in the bishop who's tryin' to shut down her parish. Once I get out there and start sniffin' around, come to find out that church is sittin' on top of a piece of real estate which a fallen archangel is trying to buy up."

"A fallen archangel? Cool," Chas said.

"Uh-unh, not cool," Constantine said, taking a long drag off his cigarette. "Definately not cool. This thing is deadly and smart. Common demons -- the elementals and soldier demons and other nasty little bastards you've seen me deal with -- those could maul you, but they're acting on pure appetite, it's all impulse. But this thing has the brains to mess with your head till you don't know up from down, and then it moves in for the kill. Which is exactly what it's doin' to the bishop."

"Sounds like one hell of a mess you gotta clean up," Chas said, a little less enthusiastic. "You seen the thing behind it all?"

"Unfortunately, yeah: it spotted me and the girl who got me called out there in the first place."

"That why you're stickin' with this job?" Chas asked, grinning crookedly at John, over his shoulder as they stood in traffic.

"No. I'm not stickin' with this job because of the girl. She's more whacked in the head than I am. Or you are."

"Aw, thanks a lot. Seriously: what're you hauling out there for?"

"Crowley can't do it because he's too close to it: that bishop is his boss. I got less at stake than he does. So, why the hell not?"

"I see now... So what's this real estate the old scratch want?"

"Mefistofel: the demon that's master-minded this is called Mefistofel. If you know the demon's name, you refer to it by name: gives you a level of power over them, since it makes it harder for them to hide once you've identified them. and to answer your question... Turns out this church is sitting on top of a hellmouth."

"A what? How'd this get to be 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'?"

"Okay, put it another way: it's on top of an interdimensional portal between the demonic realm and the human realm. The church, or to be more specific, the Holy Eucharist in the tabernacle, is the one thing keeping hell from leaking out."

"That sounds bad. I take it that's why you came back, to get out the heavy artillery," Chas asked.

"And see if I can sniff out any more leads on this case," Constantine said, taking a final pull on his cigarette and stubbing it out in the seat-back ashtray in front of him. He leaned back, expecting Chas to start bugging him for a chance to help out on this case, but Chas didn't make a peep about it. The teeny-bopper demon hunter from Sacramento must have been keeping his young apprentice hopping. Well, in that case, Chas would get a crash course in how not to track demons, and what could happen if you crossed the wrong one.

They pulled into the alleyway behind the bowling alley over which Constantine's apartment perched. Once they climbed the stairs and entered, they found Beeman waiting for them.

"How was the flight back?" Beeman asked.

Constantine plunked himself down on the worn but still usable couch. "It was a flight. You found anything for me?"

"I made a few calls to a few friends in the field," Beeman said. "It turns out that weak spot between the planes has been there since the 1650s."

"Don't tell me: one of the Salem Village witches had something to do with it," Constantine said, fumbling a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket.

"You've soaked up some of the local color, I see," Beeman said. "You see, there was this black magician who managed to slip through the witch-hunters' nets, an unpleasant character by the name of Nathaniel Dwyler. He moved to what's now Houlton, tried scratching out a living on a farm he cleared himself; it seems Lucifer later called in a favor on him. For whatever reason Dwyler refused; Lucifer sent a legion to collect Dwyler, who didn't go down without a fight. The tussle was fierce enough to weaken the temporal fabric on the site of Dwyler's far, right where that hole is now. There's been a series of churches built on that site since, but each one has burned to the ground, for one reason or another, at least until Sankt Maria's was built there."

"Including the Know-Nothings torching the first one," Constantine said, lighting up.

"So how'd Mefistofel get in on this?" Chas asked, innocently.

Beeman widened his eyes. "Mefistofel? No wonder you came back for the Shotgun."

Constantine could have socked Chas for blurting out that information. "Tell me about it."

"What's so big about this Mefisto guy anyway?" Chas asked.

Here we go, Constantine thought. He hated it when Chas happened to be in the same room with Beeman: the kid had so much to learn and the scholar was only too willing to share his encyclopedic knowledge of the ethereal realm.

"You might call Mefisto the loan shark of hell, only he's got a lot more class," Beeman began. "He keeps an eye open for humans in financial trouble, so he can offer them a contract in exchange for security. His terms are usually quite simple: he'll get you out of debt if you give him something Lucifer or one of the other head honchos of the netherworld want. You just have to sign over your soul or your first-born child, or something else just as valuable."

"Including pieces of real estate they want," Constantine said. "Namely, Sankt Maria's."

"You said it, John," Beeman said.

"Guess you got your work cut out," Chas said. "You want me to hang around?"

"Nah, I gotta box to pack and ship out and I could use forty winks," Constantine said, blowing a plume of smoke into the air.

"Jet-lag getting to you?" Beeman asked.

"Yeah, and I think I picked up a bug in my chest," Constantine said. Likely story, a voice in his head sneered.

"The cold weather up north does that to you," Beeman said. "I'll see if I can scare up some cough syrup for you."

Constantine shrugged. "Part of the territory."

.6.

Constantine crated up the Shotgun and headed out to the post office to have it overnighted. Hopefully, the U.S. Postal Service wouldn't try x-raying it: broken down, the Shotgun looked like an oddly-crafted reliquary, which had been the intention of the German gunsmith turned exorcist who'd crafted it. The designer never expected a time would come when there'd be machines that could scan past its appearances.

After fortifying himself with some Chinese take-out, he headed across town to Midnite's club: he had some reconnaisence to run on Mefistofel, and if there was any place he might overhear something, or if Midnite was forth-coming on anything he'd heard, that was the place to go.

On arriving there, and getting past the doorman's Rhine deck gauntlet, Constantine headed for the bar, where he found Midnite supervising the group of slightly shifty-looking waitstaff of no determinate gender setting up for the evening. A few patrons had already gathered, a mixed crowd (some with visible radiance around their heads, others with... more exotic signs of their species) relaxing after their day's work at... whatever they did.

He seated himself at the bar, avoiding the snarky-looking Brit in the rumpled suit at the far end and a tall guy in black at the near end, and signalled to Midnite, who regarded him with narrowed eyes as he approached.

"Hey, I've heard there's a demon named Mefistofel who's running a racket out in the East Coast," Constantine said, trying to sound conversational. "You heard anything on it? I've been lookin' for him."

An inscrutible look passed through Midnite's dark eyes. "You don't go looking for Mefistofel: He comes looking for you. He's a dealer, that one: souls are his racket."

"Yeah, so I've heard. If he comes around, don't mention my name to him, but find out where I can find him," Constantine said.

"John, what do you want with Mefisto? You think he'll buy you more time? Word's out you hit a patch of bad luck. You really want to pay his price?"

"This isn't for me: it's about someone else."

Midnite chewed the inside of his lower lip for a moment. "All right, but for this one time: I hear anything, I pass it on to you. But you know my rules: not under my roof."

"Yeah, whatever," Constantine muttered.

"Ah, ze grand Zhohn Constantine 'imself graces us wizz 'is company?" asked a rich, oily, male voice from the other end of the bar.

Constantine looked toward the source of that voice, connecting it to a tall, slim figure sitting in the shadow of a huge black pair of wings.

Constantine looked up into the taller figure's blue-grey eyes, which regarded him narrowly, his leonine face starting to gather itself in a smirk of superiority. The same face that had leered at him and Natalie as they huddled in the doorway the night before.

"Mefistofel," Constantine groaned. He would follow me, wouldn't he... he thought.

"You named me in one guess," the demon replied. Anyone who looked at this lean stranger would only see a slightly raffish-looking but otherwise clean-cut businessman in a knee-length frock-coat jacket. But Constantine's eyes could not ignore the long, greyish tail with a barb on the end of it, which snaked out from under that jacket, or the short, sharp goat's horns which sprouted from the demon's temples, laying flat along the sides of his sleek head.

"Well, by all accounts, you're a busy bastard," Constantine replied.

"As you are," the demon replied. "We seem to be encountering each other quite often: I saw you only last night. In Boston, no less, close to where I have been helping process a sale for the diocese of Houlton. What brought you out to the East Coast at this frigid time of year?"

"Business," Constantine said, non-commitally.

"And what, might I ask, is this species of business? Tell me that you aren't putting that pretty face of yours into my business, or I shall have be obliged to tear it off. Which would be a terrible tragedy."

"Yeah, well, you wouldn't have to if you'd stay out of my way," Constantine muttered.

"Or if you took care not to cross my path," the demon said, leaning closer.

"Whichever comes first," Constantine said, turning away.

He started to head for the door, but his foot caught on something and he sprawled, face down, on the floor. He propped himself up on his elbow, looking over his shoulder towards his feet. The end of Mefistofel'stail had somehow wound itself around Constantine's left ankle. The demon had tripped him.

"Be careful where you tread, M'sieu Constantine. Mea culpa..." the demon drawled, his voice oilier than ever with phony innocence. The tail-tip unwound from Constantine's ankle as the demon retracted his tail, hiding it under his jacket.

A gasp of concern -- and a few satisfied sniggers -- rose from the patrons nearby. A slim, androgynously female angel in a silvery grey skirt-suit jumped up from her table for one and knelt by Constantine's side. "Are you all right, Mr. Constantine?" she asked.

"Mefistofel, you know the rules of my house," Midnite said, approaching and glaring up at the smirking demon. "I will have no fighting in here, nor any threats against my guests."

Mefistofel shrugged, spreading his arms and wings. "I did nozzing to harm your dear friend, M'sieu' Midnite: his foot caught in a loop of my tail."

Constantine stood up, the grey-clad angel supporting him though he didn't need it. "You expect me to believe that? I could deport you right here, right now," he shot back.

Midnite reached across the bar and clamped a restraining hand on Constantine's arm. "John, don't play his game."

The words of the Ritualis rose in his mind as Constantine glared up at Mefistofel. He could do it right here, right now, and send this creature back it its proper place. But it would accomplish nothing; Mallegant would still be enslaved.

"Don't try that again, hellscum," Constantine snapped, shaking off Midnite's hand, and walked out. Mefistofel laughed, a loud mocking cackle that followed Constantine as he headed back up to the street level.

.7.

Returning to his apartment, Constantine plunked himself on the bed, flopping back on the pillow and thrusting his fingers into his tousled hair. This case was getting more nerve-wracking by the minute. He'd lost some of the element of surprise when he'd bumped into Mefistofel. Now the demon would be on its guard, more likely to strike without warning and influence its human puppets to take action before the assailant could form a strategy

Constantine had shaped a rough plan to confront the bishop the day he closed and deconsecrated Sankt Maria's. Now, who knew what would happen? He'd been considering going to the clinic at Ravenscar and having that cough checked out, if only to appease Crowley, but now, he'd need to get back to Houlton as soon as possible.

The phone rang. Constantine pulled himself up on his haunches and heaved himself off the bed to answer it.

"Hello? -- kaff-kaff."

"John? It's Crowley... we've got a situation on our hands. I'm wiring you the money to come out here on the next flight you can get."

"What in hell's going on?"

"Mallegant and his minions are pulling the noose tighter. I just got notice I have to move, and some of the churches that were supposed to be closed have had their decrees issued earlier than he'd previously announced."

"Hell, that came fast. They must have gotten wise to me."

"I'm afraid so."

"All right, I'll call you from the airport before the next flight leaves."

To Be Continued...

Literary Easter Eggs:

The dingy commuter rail -- Obviously the Massachusetts Transit Authority's Purple Line commuter rail... and the windows of those trains need to be washed.

The Un-Holy Grail -- A phrase I lifted from from Walker Percy's "Lancelot". I have to admit, the John Constantine of the movie is a lot like the kind of "bad Catholic" anti-hero you find in Walker Percy's novels: a character who's really a good guy, but not exactly a Inice/I guy.

Mefistofel -- If you're familiar with the Faust legend in any form, you'll know this guy. I've crudely Hebraicized the name (just because most of the names of demons and angels I've run across seem more Hebraic) and added the gloss on what his origins and original postition were.

The snarky-looking Brit -- Cadbury Biscuits to anyone who gets who this guy is... 


	6. 5: Eviction Notice

+J.M.J.+

The Smoke of Satan in Your House

by "Matrix Refugee"

Rating: PG-13 (spiritually mature themes, language)

Warnings: None for this chapter, aside from references to demonic activity, and Constantine's usual cussing.

Author's Note: I'd like to observe a moment of silence first, before continuing, to remember the victims of the London Underground bombings. (Hey, much of the comic book series takes place in and around London, thus it's only fitting to dedicate this chapter to their memory...)

--

--

--

--

Disclaimer: I don't own "Constantine", its characters, concepts and other indicia, which are the property of Francis Lawrence, Village Roadshow, Warner Brothers, Dc Comics/Vertigo, et al. And I certainly don't own any of the demons.

Chapter Five: Eviction Notice

This time, the trip went smoothly: No turbulence. No snow squalls. No trouble at the gate. No difficulties getting through security. 'The calm before the storm,' Constantine thought. 'They're backing down to create a false sense of security, dull your resolve.'

He found Crowley waiting for him in the concourse, the older man's sober face looking more troubled than usual. As Constantine approached, he rose to meet him. "Thank God you're here, John?"

"So I take it they sold the residence?" Constantine asked.

Crowley nodded. "They passed papers yesterday: I've got less than forty-eight hours to move out of there. My sister Martha is letting me stay with her until I can find a place of my own, but there's a problem: she doesn't have much room."

Constantine shrugged. "I'll find a way to shift for myself."

Natalie approached at that moment, her eyes red from crying. Looking up at Constantine, she flung herself at him, clinging to his neck, nearly pulling him on top of her. He managed to peel her off him.

"Watch that... what the hell's wrong?" he asked.

"He did it: he issued the decree to supress us. We're as good as dead," she said, her voice trembling.

"Damn, that was fast."

"They work quickly when they think we're off guard," Crowley said, coming to Natalie's side and putting a fatherly arm around her to support her, and to keep her from causing another outburst. "Georg Schuller just got the news from Manning this morning, and passed it on the rest of the group trying to keep Sankt Maria's open."

"How much time do we have left?" Constantine asked.

"The final Mass is supposed to be offered Sunday, March 2nd at 11 am," Natalie said, flat-voiced.

"Two days," Constantine said. "Gives me just enough time to pull this together."

"Back to practical matters: where are you going to stay while you pull this together?" Crowley asked.

"Probably put up at the YMCA," Constantine said, the need for a smoke starting to prick him.

"There isn't one in Houlton," Crowley said.

"You need a place to stay? There's a niche in the choir loft at Sankt Maria's," Natalie offered. "I go there when I need to get away from people. It's peaceful there... and that way, you can keep watch over the church, so nothing happens to it."

Crowley smiled. "I suppose that way you get the jump on the folks who are planning to hold a vigil in the church."

Constantine snerked. "Vigils aren't exactly my style."

.2.

Midnight in Sankt Maria's. Constantine stood on the main balcony of the loft, gazing down toward the sanctuary, the only light in the building came from the red

The niche in the loft turned out to be a small room at the top of one of the staircases leading to the choir loft, a room that looked like it hadn't been used in some time, except to store several dusty boxes of hymnals, a rack of cobwebby black choir robes and a few wobbly benches against one wall under a stained glass window of Saint Cecilia. With Crowley's help, Constantine had wrassled two of the benches together into a crude bunk on which he unrolled a blanket roll Crowley had loaned him. One of the benches still rocked a little, which Constantine tried to fix by jamming a hymnal under the legs. Still, the conditions would be Spartan at best: someone had turned the heat down considerably, but thankfully, it was warmer up here in the loft.

An air current caused the flame to flatten and gutter for a moment, then right itself. The candle itself had burned low in its red glass holder, but it still burned. 'A lot like me,' he thought. 'Except I'm burning out at both ends.' He took a meditative swig from the bottle of Jack Daniels he'd bought at the "package store" down the street.

For some wierd reason, probably thanks to the alcohol jittering in his system, the red sanctuary lamp put him in mind of the nightlight his mother used to light in his room when he was a kid and he started seeing monsters lurking outside the windows at night. Strange he should put the two together: that red light indicated the Presence of the Divine, within the tabernacle, keeping the demonic horde at bay.

"Ah, shuttit, you're getting drunk," he said, thinking out loud and screwing the top back on the bottle.

A large shadow landed with a thump on the sill of the rose window, blacking out much of the light. A huge pair of wings fanned across the window before folding back, revealing a lean, angular male form with a long tail. The figure crouched on its perch, peering in.

'Back in town already, Mefistofel?' Constantine thought, keeping his thoughts to himself to minimize the demon's chances of growing aware of his presence. 'Casing the joint? Drooling over your prize?' He had the feeling he had divined the demon's thoughts. He held still in the shadows, waiting for the demon to move on. He was too tired and muzzy to try repelling the interloper, and it wouldn't be necessary at this point. The Divine Presence held the demon in check.

For now.

The demon spread its wings and leapt away, out of sight. Constantine dimly heard the creature chuckling to itself. 'Biding your time, eh?' he thought as he returned to his bunk. 'Makes two of us, with different intentions.'

.3.

The next morning, during the nine am. Mass, Constantine snuck out of Sankt Maria's, heading for the coffee shop where he had agreed to meet with Crowley, en route to the post office in Salem, New Hampshire to pick up the box containing the Shotgun.

"You still using blessed silver for the shell casings?" Crowley asked, while they were on the highway.

"Only stuff that works," Constantine replied. "I tried etching crosses onto regular shell casings and having Hennessey bless them, but that wasn't as effective."

Crowley nodded. "I had a feeling you were going to say that. Martha found some old silver spoons she has no need for, so we thought you could use them... once I've blessed the raw materials."

"That'll work," Constantine said.

Once they arrived at the post office, Crowley waited in the car while Constantine went in to collect the package from the eeriely appropriate Box Number 656. Providence always did have a wierd sense of humor...

That afternoon, while Crowley was out tending to a new case that had come to his attention, and while Martha was at work, Constantine unpacked the box, which contained not just the case for the Shotgun, but also the mold for the casing and a press to seat the percussion caps with. He mixed some blessed salt into the shot before filling the cooled shells.

.4.

That evening, on returning to Sankt Maria's after the 5 pm. Mass, another coughing fit forced Constantine to duck into the washroom of the sacristy after Mass. His hacking fit must have given him away: When he raised his head from the sink and reached for a paper towel to wipe his mouth, he spotted someone standing in the doorway, looking at him. He straightened up to find Father Prewitt standing there, looking at him.

"Can I help you?" the priest asked, quizzically.

"Nah, just a bad cough I picked up thanks to this cold weather," Constantine replied, trying to sound casual.

"You're not just some businessman who's passing through the area, are you?" the priest said, putting him on the spot.

"I ain't hanging around for long, just till I'm finished with the job that brought me out here," Constantine replied, dodging the question.

The priest folded his arms on his chest. "What sort of job?"

"Researching a case."

Father Prewitt found his gaze. "What kind of a case?"

He'd have to bite the bullet now. "A case of demonic infestation and possible possession."

The priest raised his eyebrows. "Are you an exorcist?"

"Technically, I am."

"Wait, are you one of those demon hunters? Who asked you to come here?"

Constantine stepped around the priest, heading out of the washroom. "That's what I do to keep busy. And I came here because someone tipped me off that there was something diabolic kicking around a church that was being closed."

"Who told you about that?" the priest asked, putting a hand on Constantine's shoulder, stopping him.

"I ain't about to name names," Constantine replied, starting to get irritated with all these questions. And with the fact that his cover had been blown to hell.

Prewitt tightened his grip on Constantine's shoulder slightly, trying to propell him toward the door. "I'm sorry, but I'll have to ask you to leave."

Constantine shook off the priest's hand and turned to face him. "You throw me out, or if you go blabbing to Mallegant about this, then you might as well be doing the demons' work for them. There's more going on here than the dioceasan bureaucrats would care to know about. Or to find out."

"What do you mean?" Prewitt asked, puzzled and a little worried.

"I mean, this church is sitting on top of a piece of real estate that Lucifer sent his own loan shark up to buy for him. Let me show you." Constantine took the priest by the shoulder and led him to the sanctuary. Once there, he pointed to the odd tile design on the floor before the center of the altar rail. "It's right there, right in back of the chapel in the basement."

"What is?" Prewitt asked.

"An interdimensional portal, a weak spot in the curtain between the human realm and the demonic realm. A hellmouth, or a hell-hole to put it in layman's terms. This church is the cork keeping the demons bottled up; let Mallegant pull it, and it'll be hell on earth."

"That's implausible: demons are purely non-physical beings," Prewitt argued.

Constantine gripped the priest's shoulder and kneeling down, pulled the shorter man onto his knees. He pressed the palm of Prewitt's left hand to the floortiles. At the same time, he projected his awareness down into the portal, opening a conduit to allow the priest to feel what he felt.

"It's right down there, under the floor, under the foundation. You feel it?"

The priest winced and pulled his hand from under Constantine's; even while he gripped the priest's hand, Constantine could feel the tiles growing hot. Rising to his feet, Prewitt sandwiched his hand between his right arm and his side, wincing.

"So what do you intend to do about this?"

"As you found out the hard way, it's impossible to reason with Mallegant: there's reasons to suspect the demons are using him as a middleman, whether he's aware of it or not. All we have to do is to keep him from removing the altar stone and the sacred vessals the day he deconsecrates the building," Constantine said.

"So how are you going to stop him from doing that?" the priest asked.

"I don't intend to stop anything: I'm planning on cornering the demons when they're right in the act, get them out in the open."

"But they could attack you."

"Not likely: they aren't exactly fighting on their own ground."

"I don't know if I can allow this," Father Prewitt said. No trace of malice showed itself in his tone, only concern and a trace of fear.

"So? What do you suggest instead?" Constantine asked, not completely avoiding a sarcastic edge to his reply.

"Can't we call in Martin Crowley the exorcist?"

"Funny you should mention Crowley, since he was the one who called me in to cover for him so Mallegant wouldn't throw his ass out for insubordination. I'm an outsider: less risk for me. Besides, I get off on bedevilling the devils."

"But you aren't a priest."

"That should be obvious. But I've got the charism a lot of priests in this field don't have. IThey/I listen to me."

"Who else knows you're here?" The priest asked this informally, clearly just for knowledge's sake.

"One or two parishioners, tops: I've been staying under the radar, in case they got spooked by my presence. I found out my notoriety preceded me. And they know I'm hedging in on their target."

"God keep you from harm's way."

Constantine snerked. "Getting in harm's way is part of the job description. Now not a word to anyone else. I've had people getting in my face about me coming here. I don't need any more well-intentioned or bitchy old ladies trying to screw with this situation. I don't need any collateral damage on my hands."

"All right, as long as you know what you're dealing with," the priest said, relenting.

"Believe me, I know it better than I care to," Constantine said, rummaging in his coat pocket for a pack of cigarettes.

"Now where are you staying, if you don't mind my asking?"

Constantine jerked his head toward the front doors. "Up in a corner of the choir loft."

"There's an empty room in the rectory: I can let you stay there," the priest offered.

"Thanks, but I'll pass, Father. It's better if I keep watch from here."

"Keep watch?"

Constantine looked up toward the rose window over the high altar. "You've had an unwelcome visitor peeking in the windows, casing the joint at night..."

To Be Continued...

Literary Easter Egg:

Molding the shotgun shells -- Loosely inspired by the opening paragraphs of William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic". 


	7. 6: Cleaning House

+J.M.J.+

The Smoke of Satan in Your House

by "Matrix Refugee"

Rating: PG-13 (Violence, including violence against a cleric, general freakishness)

Warnings: None other than what's been mentioned above

Author's Note: This was a tough but fun chapter to write. The hardest part was choreographing the fight scene, but I had a blast with it; one thing I love the most about "Constantine" is that it's one of the extremely rare movies that shows spiritual warfare as just that: warfare, complete with casualities and demon butt-kicking. I can't stand Christian writers who fall into the sunshine-and-roses school, makes me wanna beat them upside the head with copies of Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Dante's "Inferno" and spank them with prints of Hieronymus Bosch's "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" and Pieter Breughel the Elder's "The Fall of the Rebel Angels". And any bad attitudes of any of the clerical characters is a reflection of their failings, not the author's attitude towards the clergy in general: I've met some okay priests and some good ones and some downright obNOXious ones. Father Manning (and/or his real-world counterpart/model) is just one of the obnoxious ones.

Disclaimer: I don't own "Constantine", its characters, concepts and other indicia, which are the property of Francis Lawrence, Village Roadshow, Warner Brothers, Dc Comics/Vertigo, et al. And I certainly don't own any of the demons.

Chapter Six: Cleaning House

The choir showed up at eight to start practising, waking Constantine from a sound sleep. He felt tempted to bang on the wall and tell them to keep it down to a dull roar, but that would only give away his hiding place. Besides, the cough drained him of any resolve to object.

Taking Father Prewitt's offer, he went to the rectory, connected to the church by a short passageway between the buildings, and cleaned up, taking a shower and shaving. On his way back to the church, he nearly bumped into a short, thick-set priest who grumbled at him, but made no other objection to his presence. He had a feeling this was the cantankerous Father Manning Natalie had mentioned a few times in their conversation.

He nipped out to a coffee shop and came back as the members of the parish had started to gather in the yard, talking among themselves, sharing fond memories, as they made their way inside. From the look of things, it was going to be a full house. He overheard a few old-timers saying among themselves that if this many people came to church every Sunday, it wouldn't be closing. He had a funny feeling some of those old-timers hadn't always been the most reliable about going to Sunday Mass... 'Nice going', he thought. 'Dodging your own guilt and pointing the finger at someone else for commiting the same sin.' Not that he'd ever been the most faithful about going to Mass, either, but at least he admitted it, instead of shutting his eyes to it and shifting the blame.

Once he managed to get inside, he couldn't find an empty seat that wasn't already occupied by a group of old ladies of either gender, or a young family with two small children and in several cases, another one on the way from the look of the wife's waist. He ended up standing in the back, behind a pillar, in a group of latecomers.

Father Prewitt seemed to have arranged for the parish to go out on a bang instead of the whimper Mallegant and his cronies expected: The organist literally pulled out all the stops. It sounded like they had two choirs up there: a regular mixed choir singing the hymns and an unaccompanied all male choir singing Gregorian chant. They'd even brought in a trumpet player to perform some classical fanfare during the processional. Half the parish seemed to be in the procession: the Knights of Columbus, in their 17th century black cocked-hats and red and gold short capes and sashes, silver swords at their sides, led the procession, followed by some women's sodality wearing red and white sashes over their Sunday best; about a dozen male altar servers in short white tunics over long black cassocks followed, with the two priests bringing up the rear. Father Manning, wearing less-splendid vestmants than his colleague, had a look on his face like he was just along for the ride. If attitudes like that were typical among the older priests in this diocese, no wonder it was going to hell and heading there fast in a handbasket with holes in it.

The Mass itself was a Solemn High Mass: Father Prewitt sprinkled both the sanctuary and the congregation with holy water before offering the Mass proper. Some of the holy water must have dripped onto the weak spot in the time-space fabric: Constantine could hear the demonic chatter rise and yowl at one point when the priest stepped across the threshold of the sanctuary.

After the Mass, after a final, eulogy-like speech from Father Prewitt and a few terse remarks from Father Manning, the congregation gathered in the parish hall for a farewell party. Constantine stayed on the fringes of the crowd, only half-listening to the memories people tried to share with him. He finally spotted Natalie talking in a corner with a skinny kid with dishwater-blond hair. For once she was a welcome sight. Constantine elbowed his way through the crowd to join her.

Natalie looked up, smiling at him wanly. "Oh, Mr. Constantine: I hoped you'd be down here."

He shrugged. "Couldn't pass up a free meal," he said. He glanced toward the hall door. "Mind if we step out? I need a smoke."

"Not all," Natalie said. "The noise level is starting to fray my nerves." Then almost as an afterthought, she nodded to her companion and said, "This fellow with me is Luke Thompson; he comes here once in a while, for Mass."

"So you're Father Crowley's friend?" Luke said, offering his hand to Constantine.

Constantine kept his hands in his pockets. "More like a business associate."

"Oh, so you're an exorcist? My goodness."

"Yeah, I'm more of a freelancer," Constantine said, checking the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. At that moment he coughed. 'Great timing,' he thought.

Luke eyed the pack of cigarettes Constantine shuffled out of sight. "Those things can kill you."

"Lots of things can," Constantine replied, heading out with Natalie at his heels.

Once they were outside in the sunshine, Natalie stepped in front of him as he lit up.

"So... is everything ready?" she asked.

"It's all in place," Constantine replied. "All that's left is the waiting."

"Just so you know, we're starting a sit-in, vigil, hey-this-is-God's-house-and-we-won't-let-you-in demonstration here tonight, after Tenebrae, in case you want to join us," she offered.

"I'll be there: I ain't goin' nowhere."

She was silent for a moment. "So how do you plan to pull this off?"

"I heard from Crowley that Mallegant might show up as early as tonight to take away the altar stone. When he gets here, he and his houseguests will have to deal with me, first."

"You're going to do a deliverance?"

"That's part of it. Other part is takin' out his business associate."

Natalie looked around nervously, her hand rising in that odd gesture. "You think he'll be here tonight?"

"Of course: he's been hanging around, peekin' in the windows, every night I've been here."

"Ugh. I don't like the sound of that. Scary."

"The bastard can't do anything unless Mallegant removes the Eucharist and the altar stone," Constantine said.

"I see..." Natalie said, her hand relaxing as she lowered it to her side.

"Just promise me one thing: Don't try to get involved," Constantine said. "You see anything nasty, you smell anything worse than what you'd ordinarily pick up, you get the hell out of there. You listening?"

She nodded. "I'm listening."

"Good," he said. "Last thing I need is for you to get hurt or killed or worse, and for me to have another dead body or another assault connected to my name. And don't think I'm saying this out of the kindness of my heart."

"You're not a very nice man," she said.

"I never pretended to be nice," Constantine said, flicking the spent stub of his cigarette into a melting snowbank and heading back into the church to rest up for the night.

.2.

Tenebrae, the portion of the Liturgy of the Hours reserved for the intentions of the dead, couldn't have been a more fitting final ceremony for the parish. After the last recitation of the De Profundis, Psalm 129, the priest -- thankfully Father Prewitt -- extinguished the last candles still burning in the darkened church, except for the sanctuary lamp and one candle burning on a free-standing metal candle stand at the foot of the sanctuary. A few of the women in the congregation -- much less numerous than the turn-out for that morning's Mass -- sobbed like mourners at an Irish funeral, barely visible in the gloom.

Maybe it was the somber tone of the ceremony in progress, but to Constantine's tightened awareness, as he watched from his place in the very back pew, the case containing the Shotgun under his heels, that aura under the floorboards seemed to have gotten stronger. He'd kept an eye on the windows, but so far, Mefistofel hadn't put in an appearance. Yet.

At length, the electric lights came back on. A few stragglers and families left, but the majority of the congregation -- the ones without small children -- remained, many with bedrolls and pillows with them. Some set about making themselves at home, others started praying the rosary out loud. While they were occupied with their prayers, Constantine assembled the Shotgun, keeping his awareness honed for any approaching targets. He glance up to see Natalie coming up the aisle toward him, carrying something wrapped in a towel. She approached him, almost shyly.

"I know you told me not to get involved, but I thought you might need this," she said, handing the bundle to Constantine.

"What is it?" he asked, not taking it.

"It's something I wanted to have on hand if any demons showed up: I wanted to dump it out right on Mr. Mefis's head, maybe from the parapet of the choirloft, if he showed up here," she said.

Constantine unwrapped the towel, uncovering a glass wine bottle half full of water. Holy water, he realised, sensing the aura of its blessing.

"What's this supposed to be, a Holy Molotov Cocktail?" he asked, cracking a smirk in spite of himself, as he took it in one hand.

"We had the bottle in the recycling bin: we couldn't get the deposit back on it. So I thought it would be good to carry holy water in, and perhaps I could pour it out around the church, to make a line the demons can't cross," she said.

"Sure," he said, only half-believing her. He glanced at the crowd near the front of the church, then turned back to her. "You better go back there with them."

"I'd rather stay with you," she said.

"No, go to them: it's where you belong. If you see anything strange or you sense anything nasty, you get out of here and get as many people to come with you as you can. You hear me?" he said.

"Yes, I hear you," she said, with resignation.

At that point, Luke approached, clearly looking for Natalie. "Hey, what are you doing back here?" he said.

"Keeping vigil, 'my' style," Constantine replied. He chambered a round on the Shotgun.

Luke took a step back from him, holding up his hands disarmingly. "Whoa-hoa: what is that thing?"

"It's a shotgun, can't you tell?" Constantine said.

"Yeah, but what are you doing with it?"

"I'm gonna shoot some demon's ass off, if it crosses my path," ," Constantine replied.

Something rustled in the vesitibule and the front door sighed open, then shut with a bang, loud enough to attract the attention of the assembled parishoners.

A short, stocky, bespectacled man in a long black cassock entered, taking off a black fedora and uncovering a small red skullcap perched in the middle of his thinning dishwater-blond hair. No less than Mallegant himself. The reek rising from his being nearly made Constantine cough, but he managed to hold back. No one could fault him for doing at least Isome/I of his own dirty work with his own two hands. The bishop proceeded straight up the aisle. Father Prewitt approached the bishop, meeting him halfway down the main aisle.

"What's going on here, Prewitt?" Mallegant demanded.

"We're having a vigil in God's house, is there anything wrong in that?" the priest replied.

"You know we're closing this church," Mallegant said.

"You're closing it: these people are keeping it open," Prewitt said, standing his ground.

"Then tell them to leave. I'm only here to follow through with the orders in the decree."

"I can't tell them to do that. Neither can you."

"Then I'll have you defrocked for insubordination." Something in Mallegant's voice didn't sound quite right, as if it had subtly deepened or darkened in tone, without making it unrecognizable as his own.

"On what grounds? If you did that, I'd feel it neccessary to petition the Vatican."

"Enough! Get out of my path and order them out of here!" Mallegant -- or the demons speaking through him -- snapped.

The congregation had gotten restless. "We'll stay as long as this place is standing." -- "This is God's house, not yours, Mallegant." -- "Our ancestors built this place, and now you want to pull it down?" -- "What's enough, Mallegant?" A ten-year old kid piped up, "You're not a very nice bishop!", before his father shushed him.

"This is no place for you anyway; go back to your homes," Mallegant ordered, in his normal voice, stepping past Prewitt and addressing the people.

"Sir, this BIS/B their home!" Prewitt said, trying to step in front of Mallegant. His superior turned on him and pushed him to the floor, sending the priest sliding across the tiles. The people gasped.

"In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, leave us alone!" Natalie yelled. Luke covered her mouth with his hand; she tried to push him off, but he managed to pin her arms.

"Who's hiding back there?" Mallegant demanded in his normal voice. Then in the less than human tone, "Is that you, Constantine?"

So much for the element of surprise, Constantine thought, glancing up at the windows. All they needed now was for the demonic power behind Mallegant's decisions to show up. He rose and stepped out into the aisle, keeping the Shotgun down.

"Yeah, it's me, but don't let that mess with your plans, Mallegant," Constantine said.

Prewitt had gotten up, rubbing the back of his head. "You heard his Eminence, folks," he said, beckoning to his flock. "Follow me."

The crowd reluctantly rose and headed for the front door. As Prewitt passed Constantine, he put a hand on the taller man's shoulder. "You'd better know what you're doing," he said, with concern.

"Trust me on this," Constantine said.

As the last stragglers left the church, something large landed on the outer sill of the rose window and started scratching at the stone frame. Mallegant approached the altar, seeming to hesitate as he reached the foot of the sanctuary; then something shook him from within and he stepped through the open brass gates. A hellish stink, worse than the usual faint whiff, started to rise from the hotspot. Mallegant stepped up to the altar and set his wooden satchel on top of it, lifting the lid of the satchel. He unlocked the tabernacle and removed the ciborium containing the Eucharist, which he set in the satchel, then he approached the sanctuary lamp and lifting the preforrated brass cover, blew it out.

Above, the shadow at the window spread its wings, taking flight. Its aura did not withdraw --

Crack-SMASSHHHH

The window shattered, the frame falling in and crashing to the floor in a heap of rubble. Mefistofel dropped in through the window, wings folded close to his back like a diving hawk. He spread them, breaking his dive, as he landed behind Mallegant. The bishop turned to the demon, trembling a little, then catching himself, that inward force pulling him up in a more confident posture.

"I gave you what you needed, now give me what I came for," Mefistofel said, holding out one hand to Mallegant.

Before the bishop could reply, Constantine took aim and fired, putting two shots under the demon's left wing. Mefistofel howled and whirled round.

"You would interfere with my business and keep me from what's mine, wouldn't you, boy?" Mefistofel snarled, his face contorted with pain. "With blessed bullets."

"This heap wasn't yours in the first place," Constantine retorted

Mefistofel snarled, lunging at Constantine, jaws wide open displaying an amount of fangs no mere human could have fit in his mouth. Constantine started to aim at those jaws, but he spotted movement near the floor. The tip of Mefistofel's tail darted toward his ankle, but before it could make contact, he pulled Natalie's bottle of holy water from his pocket and hurled it at the demon's tail. The bottle hit, shattering on contact, the force and the holy water's blessing enough to sever the tail. A flow of black blood poured from the wound, spattering the floor. Mefistofel reached out, trying to grab Constantine by the arm, but his would-be prey struck him in the groin with the butt of the Shotgun, knocking him over backwards, and onto the floor.

Constantine knelt over the demon's neck, pinning him to the tiles over the hotspot, pressing the muzzle of the Shotgun to the demon's forehead. He had to work fast: the tiles under him had started to curl up from the growing heat below. With his right hand, he made the Sign of the Cross over the demon, three times, while his left index finger rested on the trigger of the Shotgun:

"I cast you out, unclean spirit! Begone, then, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Give place to the Holy Spirit by this sign of the holy cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever."

"And what do you think you are doing with me?" Mefistofel snarled up at Constantine.

"Sending you back to hell, you bastard," Constantine replied.

"Leave that man alone!" Mallegant's normal voice called. Constantine looked up into Mallegant's face; the bishop stood over them both, the altar stone in his hand. The possessed man was doubtlessly blinded. Constantine could see Mefistofel's demonic form, but Mallegant, his eyes clouded by the presences within him, could see only the demon's human shell.

Mefistofel started to gather himself for a final attack, his one sound wing flaring across the tiles. Constantine fired; the top blew off the demon's skull as he crumpled to the tiles, his shell already starting to crumble into dust.

Mallegant grabbed at Constantine's sleeve, swinging the altar stone at his head. Constantine ducked, dropping the Shotgun. He grabbed both of Mallegant's wrists, squeezing them.

Mallegant lost his grip on the stone. Before it hit the floor, Constantine let go of Mallegant with one hand and caught the stone. Mallegant tried to grab at it. "That's mine!" the voice that barely sounded like his hissed.

"The hell, it ain't," Constantine said. He bashed Mallegant under the jaw with the stone, knocking his attacker out cold.

Mallegant sagged against him, pulling him toward the floor. Constantine let him drop the rest of the way to the sanctuary floor, then knelt over him, straddling the possessed man's body. The demons were less likely to use an unconscious host to attack him, which should make the deliverance easier. Hopefully.

"Holy Lord, almighty Father, everlasting God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who once and for all consigned that fallen and apostate tyrant to the flames of hell, who sent your only-begotten Son into the world to crush that roaring lion; hasten to our call for help and snatch from ruination and from the clutches of the noonday devil this human being made in your image and likeness," Constantine commanded, in Latin. "Strike terror, Lord, into the beast now laying waste your vineyard. Fill your servants with courage to fight manfully against that reprobate dragon, lest he despise those who put their trust in you, and say with Pharaoh of old: 'I know not God, nor will I set Israel free.' Let your mighty hand cast him out of your servant, Benjamin Mallegant, so he may no longer hold captive this person whom it pleased you to make in your image, and to redeem through your Son; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen."

Mallegant's body tensed under him. The shapes of hideous faces seemed to press against the wall of the bishop's chest. Constantine pressed down on them, forcing them back.

"Depart, then, impious one, depart, accursed one, depart with all your deceits, for God has willed that man should be His temple. Why do you still linger here? Give honor to God the Father almighty, before whom every knee must bow. Give place to the Lord Jesus Christ, who shed His most precious blood for man. Give place to the Holy Spirit... Begone, now! Begone, seducer! Your place is in solitude; your abode is in the nest of serpents; get down and crawl with them."

He felt the demons loosening their grip within their captive. Mallegant's body convulsed and his mouth dropped open. A dark cloud, like a swarm of black flies flew out of his mouth, heading straight for the cracks in the tiles over the hotspot, where they vanished.

Constantine picked up the altar stone and replaced it in the depression for it in the altar table. He reached into his coat pocket, taking out a linen handkerchief and picked up the ciborium, placing it back inside the tabernacle and shutting the door. He looked back down to the foot of the sanctuary.

The floor tiles lay flat but the scratch marks, where Mefistofel had clawed the floor remained. The demonic presence had lessened, no longer as strong as it had been.

He stepped down from the altar plinth, approaching the spot where Mallegant lay. The bishop's eyes fluttered open.

"Oof... ow..." Mallegant groaned, rubbing his jaw and wincing. "What... what happened?"

"Take it easy there, you just had seven demons pulled out of you," Constantine said, approaching and kneeling over him.

"Hey there, what's going on in here?" an official-sounding but slightly nasally voice called. Constantine looked up: Two uniformed police officers approached, following two plain-clothes detectives.

Constantine stood up, facing the police. "Officers, this ain't what it looks like," he said, holding his hands open by his sides, showing he was unarmed.

"We got a witness who says you just disturbed this otherwise peaceful house by bashin' Bishop Mallegant under the jaw," one of the detectives said, holding up a pair of handcuffs.

"Gentlemen, please, he probably just knocked some sense into me," Mallegant argued, pulling himself to his feet.

The other detective put a hand on Mallegant's shoulder and gently helped him to sit down on the sanctuary steps. "You take it easy there, Your Eminence; we've got an ambulence on the way."

"Shit," Constantine muttered as the first detective yanked his arms behind his back and slapped the cuffs onto his wrists before strong-arming him outside.

In the dooryard of the church, a line of police officers held back the crowd of parishoners and by-standers, the former trying to get back inside, the latter trying to see what was going on. Over the rustle of voices from asking questions among themselves and the policemen's calm orders to "please step back, there's nothing to see here", Constantine heard a woman yelling at someone. As the detective pushed him into the back of a waiting patrol car, Constantine traced the yelling to Natalie, at the edge of the crowd, yattering at a completely cowed Luke, who was trying to keep his cellphone out of her reach.

The kid had made the call, dammit.

To Be Continued...

Literary Easter Eggs:

The kid who piped up -- I had to have a kid put in his two cents, to honor the kids and parents of Our Lady of the Presentation School, who got shut out of their own graduation when the diocesan goons decided to try and prevent any demonstrations when they closed the school three days ahead of schedule. Instead, they wound up with a media circus complete with families camping out in the school playground, angry kids, and the SPCA aiming charges at the bishop for endangering the classroom pets trapped in the building.

"Sir, this IS their home!" -- A deliberate riff on the Karl Malden character's line "Boys, this 'IS' my parish!" in "On the Waterfront"

Quotes from the Rite of Exorcism -- Taken from the 1968 translation of the Ritualis, which I found via http/ . Unfortunately, I couldn't find it in the original Latin though I wanted to. 


	8. Epilogue: Locking Up

+J.M.J.+

The Smoke of Satan in Your House

by "Matrix Refugee"

Rating: PG (Language)

Warnings: None

Disclaimer: I don't own "Constantine", its characters, concepts and other indicia, which are the property of Francis Lawrence, Village Roadshow, Warner Brothers, Dc Comics/Vertigo, et al. And I certainly don't own any of the demons.

Epilogue: Locking Up

WBZ-TV Channel 4 News at Noon -- March 2, 2005

"...We begin tonight with a story which Catholics in the Houlton area are talking about.

"In a bizarre turn of events, Bishop Benjamin Mallegant has personally over-turned a decision to close Saint Mary Magdalen Church. Jim Langair is live at the church with the details. Jim?"

The footage cut to a shot of the field reporter standing in front of Sankt Maria's. "Thank you, Christine. Saint Mary Magdalen's Church has been the center of contraversy between parishoners and members of the dioceasan hierarchy, but last night, that nearly turned into a physical confrontation during an otherwise peaceful sit-in.

The feed cut to a series of shots of the interior of the church, mostly focussing on the glass and stone littering the sanctuary floor. "Debris from a window broken in by vandals covers the floor of this historic parish. It's unclear who the vandals were and why they did this, but it added to the confusion last night, when Bishop Mallegant showed up, unexpectedly, to personally remove the altar stone and the church's ritual vessals.

"Parish members tried to reason with the bishop, but were ordered to leave the building. That was when a man approached the bishop and hit him in the jaw with a piece of stone before proceeding to perform a crude exorcism over the injured bishop, whom some parish members claimed was demonically possessed."

A mug shot of Constantine -- looking thoroughly disgruntled, but glumly resigned to the fact -- came up on the screen. "That man, forty-four year old John Constantine of Los Angeles, California, a self-styled exorcist turned demon-hunting detective, is now in police custody, facing assault charges..."

.2.

It wasn't the first time Constantine had seen the inside of a jail cell after someone had interfered during a deliverance; fortunately, his only cellmates were three drunken teenagers sleeping off their booze. Their parents came for them in the morning

A couple hours later, the guard came back and unlocked the door. "Hey there, Hellboy: you got lucky. The pearly gates got opened for you." Constantine stifled a derisive laugh, masking it with a coughing fit as he got up from the bunk and followed the guard out, down a hallway and into the vestibule. Crowley was there, with no less than Mallegant himself, both of them clearly waiting for him.

"Good news, John," Crowley said. "But I'd better let His Eminence tell you."

"I've had the charges dropped: You did the right thing when your peformed that exorcism, even if you had to hit me to keep me down," Mallegant said.

Constantine shrugged. "It had to be done, or the demons in you would have killed us both."

"Besides that, you freed me from those unwelcome spiritual visitors. I knew they were there, I was merely blinding myself to the fact, telling myself it was just a stronger version of the despairing voices that haunted me before I went on anti-depressants some years back."

"By any chance, you changed meds since the voices got worse?" Constantine asked. Wouldn't be the first time, in his experience, that a case of possession had manifested as medication-resistant depression...

Mallegant nodded. "I thought it was a problem with the drugs or that I was merely over-stressed from handling the deficit, or maybe I merely hoped that's all it was. Thank God they're gone now."

"Next time -- should it happen again -- I hope you're a little more discerning. I don't want to have to haul ass all the way out here again," Constantine said.

"You won't have to trouble yourself with that, and I'm afraid the DA's office would only let me drop the charges if I filed a restraining order on you. Aside from that legal technicality, Crowley told me everything he knew about this case, including Mr. Mefis's real identity. I was a fool to shut my eyes to what was going on, or maybe I was blinded by the demonic aura, which meant I was too close to see what would have happened if that church came down."

"I take it that means the folks at Sankt Maria's get to keep their church?" Constantine said.

"I've already reversed the decree," Mallegant said. "Of course, it's going to need some repairs, thanks to what went down last night, but we'll figure something out."

"Next time you file with an accountant, make sure the guy's legit, and not some demonic con artist," Constantine said.

"That's for me to handle," Crowley said.

"Better you than me," Constantine replied, feeling in his pocket for his smokes.

.3.

That afternoon, Goerg Shuller and several men of Sankt Maria's set to work cleaning up the shattered glass and broken stone, where something had smashed in the rose window; Georg called in a contractor he knew, to handle boarding up the window until they could find someone to repair it. Luke Thompson claimed he'd seen a flying demon smash the window the night before, and it seemed more likely that some hoodlums had got up on the roof of the telephone company building behind the church and thrown things at the window from there.

But they didn't find any bricks or anything like that among the debris that littered the sanctuary. And a large scorchmark, shaped like something tall with wings, covered the pattern in the tiles on the floor at the foot of the sanctuary.

He and his helpers were almost finished, when Georg looked up to see a tall, dark, lanky youngish man pass through the vestibule, that same man he'd seen talking with Natalie O'Halloran, the day before.

"Hey, hey there!" Georg called. The younger man paused, turning to him, a suitcase in one hand, a roll of blankets under the other arm.

Georg approached the dark man. "You're that demon hunter they talked about on the news this morning, the fellow who turned up here last night. You're John Constantine."

"Yeah, that's me." He darted a glance at the propped-open street doors, as if he were in a hurry to leave.

"Is it true what Luke Thompson said, that you pulled a demon out of Bishop Mallegant last night?" Georg asked.

"Not exactly: I pulled seven demons out of him," Constantine replied.

"So that explains why he was acting so strangely."

"He made himself a sitting duck, choosin' the kind of help he did."

"Like that sleazy-looking financial advisor?"

"Another demon, a fallen arch-angel to be exact."

"That sounds nasty."

"The hell it is."

"So you exorcised that demon, too?"

"Shot it straight back to hell."

"And you came all the way out here from Los Angeles to take care of this?"

"Wasn't like I did it out of the kindness of my heart: like I've been tellin' people, Martin Crowley called me out here to cover for him since he was too damn close to clean it out."

"Well, it helped save this parish: we're beyond grateful for that. We're holding a thanksgiving Mass tomorrow morning, once we clean up here. You're welcome to join us."

"I'll take a raincheck, chief: I got a plane to catch, and I ain't the kind of guy you folks would really care to associate with."

With that, Constantine went out into the early spring sunlight, a dark shadow against the melting snow.

.4.

As usual, on passing through airport security, Constantine set off the metal detector. The guard made him step aside: routine stuff. Constantine removed a handful of change from one pocket, his keyring from another, his lighter from his breast pocket and put them in the small plastic bin the guard held out to him before stepping through the detector again.

On the other side, a female guard took the lighter from the bin before relinquishing the rest of the metal objects. "I'm afraid I have to confiscate this, sir," she said.

"It's a family heirloom, it's got a lot of sentimental value," Constantine argued. "Belonged to my English great-uncle."

"I'm sorry, but that's the rule," she said.

"Since when? I've brought that lighter with me dozens of times."

"It's a new ruling that just went into effect two days ago."

"Typical..." Constantine grumbled. He had a feeling someone was using this get a kick at him...

The End...

Literary Easter Egg:

Constantine's age -- I'm riffing like... hell, since Keanu Reeves is forty-one and the John Constantine of the graphic novels is pushing fifty, so I thought I'd hit a comprimise.

Afterword: I'm at work on a sequel, so in the manner of movie trailers...

Coming soon...

(Music: "Vater Unser" -- E Nomine remixed)

Warner Bros' shield. Village Roadshow logo. DC/Vertigo Comics logo -- one after the other, all in a hellishly burnt-out sepia.

Fade in: Constantine and Chas standing in St. Peter's Square. A flock of harpy-like demons swoop down at them.

An aged, deceased bishop lying in state, clad in deep red vestments. The foreground goes out of focus and the background becomes clearer: Constantine is standing in the shadow of a thick, Romanesque column, gazing toward the bier in the foreground.

Constantine (V.O.): "The keys of the kingdom are passing to the next successor to the Fisherman..."

A procession of scarlet and white-clad cardinals filing into St. Peter's Basillica. The light is dim and they look shaken.

A completely crazy-looking woman dragging her weedy-looking seminarian son down a Baroque corridor.

A severe-looking German cardinal raising his hand, either in benediction or rebuke.

A shot of a solar eclipse over St. Peter's Basillica.

Constantine (V.O.): "Trouble is, the Ol' Scratch has been trying to get his hands on those keys for 2,000 years."

Chas and Constantine, accompanied by a cheerful-looking (and slightly chubby) monk, creeping along a darkened passageway, carrying thick candles as torches.

A hand (Constantine's?) pulling a sheet of black canvas over the scratched-up face of a youngish man in the tattered, bloodied remains of a cassock.

Chas looking freaked-out by something out of camera range.

Constantine (V.O.): "What's to stop hell from makin' a pass at heaven's gate during the changing of the guard?"

Two Monica Bellucci-clones walking side by side into the shadows of a dark street, approaching us. As they step into a pool of shadows, their eyes start to glow red.

Male voice with a German accent (V.O.): "You have that rare gift, Constantine: Use it to protect your sisters and brothers."

Constantine sitting with his head in his hands, grinding his teeth, eyes screwed shut.

A winged male demon, clad in a long black coat, perched on the capital of a column, laughing maniacally.

Constantine (V.O.): "A gift? More like a curse straight from hell."

Constantine laying on his back, shirt torn open. One of the demonic brunettes slithers over him, her mouth seeking his.

Lightning flashes. Blackout.

Title card on screen: Heaven's Door is Unguarded

And The Faith of Millions is Under Fire

The Battle Begins

AUGUST 22, 2005

Constantine: Changing of the Guard

A fanfic by "Matrix Refugee" 


End file.
